Do your DAX measures return interesting values but not the numbers you want? If the answer is yes, and it happens to all of us, then the problem probably lies with the filter context in which the measures have been calculated and the fact that you haven't correctly identified them. When a DAX measure is calculated in the "Values" bucket of a Power BI visual, whether it's a column chart, pie chart, table , matrix or indeed any other visual,… Read More
DAX Blog Posts

By Stuart Box
DAX Power BI in Practice 21st December 2020
Join our mailing list to get “The Concise Guide to DAX” pdf
"Why does the world need another DAX book ?" was my first question to Alison when she told me she'd written guide to the DAX language in Power BI. "Well, I've written the guide that I wish had been around when I was first learning DAX, aimed at Excel users of varying levels of ability". Was her reply. "You see many Excel users would struggle to construct an "IF" formula, let alone know what VLOOKUP stands for. These are often… Read More

By Alison Box
DAX Power BI in Practice 12th November 2020
How DAX Treats Nulls & Zeros
In DAX there is a special way to identify null or empty values and that's by using a value called "blank". In order to return blank values, we can use the BLANK() function e.g. 10 Percent = IF ( Winesales[CASES SOLD] > 100, Winesales[CASES SOLD] * 0.1, BLANK () ) When constructing DAX expressions using IF, if you want to return BLANK() on the "Value if false" argument, you can just close off on the bracket because BLANK() is the… Read More

By Stuart Box
Cloud DAX Excel Online Training Power BI in Practice Training Virtual Classrooms 29th April 2020
All our courses are now available as Live Online Training
All our Courses are now available as "Live Online Training", here's what you need to know. In a "Social Distancing" world we can't gather together in groups for Training. So how can organisations keep their skills current when we can't get together in the same room? The answer is with Live Online Training.Read More→ Read More

By Stuart Box
Cloud DAX Learning Online Training Power BI in Practice Virtual Classrooms 8th April 2020
Live Online Power BI Training from Burningsuit
We have many years' experience of training people how to use Microsoft Power BI. Up to now our training has all been face-to-face, either as open public courses in London or private on-site training. Obviously due to the current coronavirus restrictions this type of course is not possible, so we're launching Live Online PowerBI training. Having had experience in online training in the past we're confident that this will provide a first-class learning experience in these difficult times. What is… Read More

By Alison Box
DAX Power BI in Practice 16th March 2020
Power BI Conditional Formatting
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
4 Responses

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
2 Responses

By Alison Box
DAX Microsoft Power BI in Practice 20th January 2020
The 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
2 Responses

By Alison Box
DAX Power BI in Practice 18th November 2019
Find 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
5 Responses

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