Skip to main content

Pizza and DAX are my Love Languages


Okay, okay, not really. Beer is though. But if my wife asks, it's "quality time spent with her watching British dramas on PBS Masterpiece."

In all seriousness, if you are new to Power BI - then DAX may seem like a foreign language.  Do you want to find out some quick tips or best practices?  Well, let me give you a few tips that were helpful to me when first starting to write DAX formulas.

  • The TAB key is your best friend.  Don’t try to type everything character for character for your formulas.  Just type until you the formula, column, table, etc. shows up directly under the formula bar.  Once, it is there hit the tab button and it automatically promotes it into your formula bar. 

  • Is the formula text too small for you?  It’s always too small for me when doing demonstrations for others.  Place your cursor in the formula bar.  Hold down the control key on your keyboard and use your mouse scroll wheel to make the text larger or smaller.
  • Would you like to move to a new line to continue writing your DAX formula?  Simply hit Shift + Enter to move to a new line.

  • Use the informational tip box that comes out when writing your formulas.  It will let you know what the function needs in order to do its job.  Does it need a table reference first?  Does it need you to feed it a column?  Does it want an expression?  Don’t worry about memorizing what it needs, because the informational tool tip will guide you through the process.

  • Parentheses can be the death of getting a formula just right. Trust me,  I used to be an Algebra 1 and 2 teacher.  The order of operations pays special attention to those parentheses.  Thankfully, the IntelliSense of DAX will let you know with a slight green highlight of what parentheses match with its partner.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Best Practice To Trim Before Removing Duplicates or Merging In Power Query Editor

In last week’s blog, I wrote and did a video about how to remove duplicate records and keep the most recent entry as long as a date column was part of the data source.   I came across the scenario while giving training on Power BI with my company Pragmatic Works.   See the video below:     This week, while doing another two-day training I came across a different scenario from a follow-up conversation from day 1.   I had explained how to remove duplicate records and one of the students started working on a Power BI project she has for her company.   On day 2 the student informed me that her remove duplicates step was not working.   I said that is odd and I asked to see the data.   In one of her table visuals, I could see that it appeared that a few of the records had duplicates based on the name column.   After further investigation though, we figured out the culprit.     She had done all the steps correctly, but it was a data integrity issue.   In her data source, the perso

Relating "Related Tables" to Baseball because I Miss Sports

I miss sports. In particular, I miss baseball. Between learning more Power BI functions and the ins-and-outs of DAX, I've turned to Netflix to fill the deep caverns left in my soul since baseball season has been postponed. And as a result, I've thought more about tigers and big cats more than I ever have in my life. I know ALL about Carol Baskins and am fully on board for a spin-off centering on locating her lost husband. I've googled "is it really legal to own a tiger in a residential area?" Without baseball in April, I am barely hanging in there (kinda like Joe Exotic's eyebrow ring). So, I am filling the sports-sized hole by using baseball stats in Power BI to demonstrate pulling data from multiple tables and consolidating it into one table.  Some of the data we want to consolidate also has to have some aggregations (which is fancy for "calculations") performed on it.  In this demo I will attempt to break down what is really going on

Create A Record Without A Form In Power Apps Using PATCH

 In Power Apps, forms are great to use to submit data to be recorded in your data source.  They do not take long to set up and the functions used to submit the data are fairly simple.  This simplicity, however, can come at a cost.  The cost of using a form is you don’t have a lot of design control in terms of layout and design.  If you don’t like the rigid structure of forms and want more freedom, then I’ve got the fix for you.  You need to become acquainted with the Patch function.   The Patch function allows you to update or create a new record in your data source.   The Patch function requires you to identify your data source, decide if you want to update or create a record, and then point to your controls on the app that contains the data you are submitting.   The coding is a little more involved compared to SubmitForm(FormName) that you use on forms.   The payoff, though, for learning a little more advanced code is you get complete design freedom for your data input controls.