Calculated Measures on a Halloween Full Moon

According to The Old Farmers Almanac, a "full moon on Halloween only occurs roughly once every 19 years. If the full moons are calculated using Greenwich Mean Time, that translates to approximately three to four times per century." And on the day I am writing this post, October 31^st of the year 2020, there is a full moon. Spooky, huh? Frightening? Maybe. But not as scary as having too many calculated measures in your Power BI reports! <Ba dum tss> Okay, so maybe the full moon and candy are getting to me.

If you have made calculated measures for your reports, you know that they can quickly become quite numerous. Also, if you are not aware yet a measure only gets run when brought into a visual and a measure is dynamic. This means that a measure does not need to be housed/located on a specific table in order to function. So the question becomes where should I put my measures. There are a few ways to organize these.

1) No organization plan at all. Just put them all over the place. Not the way I like to make a report, but they will still work.

2) Make a measures folder in one of your tables and house all your measures there. This solution is much better than the one mentioned above. You just need to remember what table you put this folder in.

3) Make a separate table that contains no data, and put your measures there. This is my preferred method and I will walk you through it below. I also like to put a special character in front of my table name so that it either is always located at the top in my field pane or at the very bottom. I usually use a forward slash “/” to get it right at the top.

To make a table when in report view, go to the home ribbon and click Enter Data.

No need to put in any info into the table at this point. Just name your table and click load. Again, I like to put that forward slash in front so it will bring this table to the top of the fields pane.

That is it. You are all done and you now have

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