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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.

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