Book Image

Extreme DAX

By : Michiel Rozema, Henk Vlootman
Book Image

Extreme DAX

By: Michiel Rozema, Henk Vlootman

Overview of this book

This book helps business analysts generate powerful and sophisticated analyses from their data using DAX and get the most out of Microsoft Business Intelligence tools. Extreme DAX will first teach you the principles of business intelligence, good model design, and how DAX fits into it all. Then, you’ll launch into detailed examples of DAX in real-world business scenarios such as inventory calculations, forecasting, intercompany business, and data security. At each step, senior DAX experts will walk you through the subtleties involved in working with Power BI models and common mistakes to look out for as you build advanced data aggregations. You’ll deepen your understanding of DAX functions, filters, and measures, and how and when they can be used to derive effective insights. You’ll also be provided with PBIX files for each chapter, so that you can follow along and explore in your own time.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part I: Introduction
6
Part II: Business cases
15
Other Books You May Enjoy
16
Index

Dynamic measures

A visual is bound to a measure by adding the measure to an appropriate bucket, like the Value bucket in a column chart. What we want to achieve is to let the user select a KPI using a slicer and adapt the measure to that selection. As measure binding is static (we cannot dynamically replace the measure with another measure), we need to create a DAX measure that responds to the slicer selection.

For this dynamic measure to work, a couple of things are needed:

  1. We need to create basic measures for each KPI.
  2. In order to use a slicer, we need to create a helper table with the KPI description.
  3. We need to create a new measure that, based on the selection, selects the corresponding basic KPI measure.

Let us start with the basics.

The basic KPI measures

First, we create the three basic DAX functions for our KPIs:

  1. The sales per month will be calculated by the DAX table function SUMX:
    Sales = SUMX(
               fSales...