I thought this would be an easy blog. Not much to say about using Power BI's Conditional Formatting. All it does is make visuals look more appealing by using pretty colours based on the data's values. How wrong I was! In fact there's so much to say that I've had to resort to a mini contents page using outline numbering and links to the relevant paragraphs. In fact, just like the old days of writing user manuals! So here goes… Read More
DAX Blog Posts
By Alison Box
DAX Power BI in Practice 22nd January 2020
Categorising Measures into Numeric Ranges or “Bins”
We've often been asked if it's possible to group the results of a DAX measure into numeric ranges. For example, to group a Total Sales measure for each Customer into various numeric ranges, sometimes referred to as "bins". The answer is, yes it is, as you can see from the screenshot below:- In this screenshot, we can see that we have five customers whose Total Sales fall between 150,000 and 199,999 in 2019. How did I do this? Firstly, my… Read More
By Alison Box
DAX Microsoft Power BI in Practice 20th January 2020The Key Influencers Visual Versus Strictly Come Dancing
The Key Influencers visual, introduced in February 2019, is Microsoft's first visual that uses "Machine Learning" to identify factors that influence the outcome of a particular metric. "Wow", I thought! The idea of leaving Power BI to do all the hard work in analysing my data seemed too irresistible to ignore, so I gave way to temptation and decided to give it a go. On the one hand, it's a very simple visual to construct (it only has 3 buckets;… Read More
By Alison Box
DAX Power BI in Practice 18th November 2019Find a Value in the Previous Row
Recently I was asked by one of our clients to solve this question; how could they calculate the number of days between customers' transactions? Clearly, in order to do this calculation, you would need to find the transaction date that was previous to the transaction date sitting in the current row. You could then subtract the earlier date from the later date and return the days between them. It occurred to me, that such a calculation could have a more… Read More
By Stuart Box
DAX Learning Power BI in Practice Training 16th September 2019
Level Up! Take your Power BI Skills to the next level with Advanced Training
This week we're delighted to announce the availability of our new advanced Power BI courses. We offer a full range of courses to take users from their first look a Power BI to advanced topics such as Apps, Row-Level-Security and CALCULATE and FILTER in DAX. Read this post to find out about these new courses and see which one is right for you.Read More→ Read More
By Alison Box
DAX Power BI in Practice 19th May 2019Best and Worst: Two approaches to finding Top or Bottom N Percent using DAX
Ever wanted to find which are your best or worst customers or best or worst products by a metric such as Total Sales? Finding a simple TopN or BottomN (e.g. Top 10 Customers) in Power BI Desktop couldn't be easier; just use the TopN Filter:- But what about finding Top 10 Percent of a value like Total Sales? As the number of our customers or our products grows over time, finding a simple Top 10 or Bottom 10 of a… Read More
By Burningsuit
DAX 21st November 2018
Four DAX Functions You Can’t Live Without
Data Analysis Expressions, known as DAX, is the Function language that is used to solve data analysis problems in Power BI. DAX is used in the much the same way that you use Formulas to solve analysis problems in Excel. These expressions, when used in Measures, analyse our data by applying or removing specific filters from the data, filters that would be difficult to accomplish with the normal filtering tools in Power BI such as Slicers and Visual Level Filters.… Read More
By Burningsuit
Case Study DAX Learning Power BI Resources Training 24th July 2018
Case Study: Training Heathrow Airport Staff
Heathrow Airport is the UK’s largest airport, serving 204 destinations in 85 different countries and with 78 million passengers passing through the airport in 2017. Burningsuit have been providing Power BI Training and Consultancy to Heathrow Airport since August 2017. Heathrow Airport approached us after two of their staff members attended one of our Public Microsoft Power BI Service Courses in London in August 2017 and found the training useful and appropriate. Following this, Heathrow decided to book several on-site… Read More
By Burningsuit
DAX 9th July 2018
DAX: Is the Total Row in a table giving you grief?
If you are having issues with the total row of tables in DAX, this may be a familiar sight: When actually, all you want is this: So, what’s going on here? Why does my first table multiply the totals together, but my second table sum the values in the column above? Stuart Box, Owner of Burningsuit explains. Our solution to create the correct table In the first measure, “Sales V1”, I used this DAX expression: Sales V1 = SUM… Read More
By Burningsuit
DAX 15th June 2018DAX: How to group measures into numeric ranges
DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a useful library of functions used across Power BI, Excel and SQL. Stuart Box, Burningsuit's owner and trainer who is both a Microsoft Certified Professional and Member of the Learning and Performance Insitute, explains how to use DAX in Power BI to easily group or categorise numeric fields into ranges (sometimes called 'bins') below: How to group numeric fields Firstly, right click on the numeric field in the field list, as select “group”. Once grouped, you can… Read More
