Tag: DAX

Hello,

today I’m not writing any type of tutorial. I just want to share a weird behavior I have found in calculation groups, hoping that those that really know about the inner workings can help us comprehend why they behave like that. Calculation groups can be seen as groups of pairs of DAX expressions that replace measures and their format strings when they are in a filter context where they participate. There’s quite a few articles that explain calculation group precedence, but when a calculation item is applied, how are the values of SELECTEDMEASURE and SELECTEDMEASUREFORMATSTRING evaluated? are they the values and format string *before* anything is applied? What happens if we include SELECTEDMEASURE inside the format string expression or SELECTEDMEASUREFORMATSTRING inside the value expression? If your head is about to explode, you are not alone.

In the different posts of this blog I’ve reached different conclusions in different articles, so today I want to present two examples to deepen in this topic — during this process I hope to understand it more!

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Hi! actually I was writing another blog post, but today I was shown something that can be done with calc groups that I wasn’t aware of. And not only that, even though the blog post I was shown had some very clever thinking behind, I found there’s still some room for improvement to bring the technique to the next level. We are talking about sorting a matrix by a calculation item placed at the columns section. Let it be said that in many use cases you might be better of just generating the measures with a script (as I showed in this blog post) and using the measures instead. That will give you more control with the UI since each column is indeed a different measure. Yet, there’s something cool in doing things in different way, so I’ll go ahead nevertheless.

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Hello hello, I’m not writing that much lately due to spring break and a DAX training I’m teaching, but I think I have just enough time to explain a fun use case I found the other day at work. In Real Estate each asset can be in a bunch of different states, especially if there is litigation, squatters, repairs etc. So in this case they want to compare the latest snapshot with the snapshot of one week ago, and see how many assets they have in each state, but also in which state were they a week ago. Let’s get to it!

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Hello there,  yes, a third part of the snapshot report and I’m not even sure it’s the last one. The thing is that since the last post there has been some major improvements on the set up that I thought are worth sharing. In my previous post I ended up with a small defeat. There were some combinations of filters that when I drilled through to see all the historic records of those order IDs I would not get any rows. Also my set up included duplicating the fact table which is a big no-no in most use cases and a shameful solution from a modeler perspective. Even though this was the best I had, I decided to present the topic on two events, one was the Data Community Day Austria 2023 and the other was @PowerBIEspanol Virtual Conf 2023 (Fin Tour Power BI Days), just a few days apart. The fact that I had to present the solution to a lot of people kept me thinking and looking for solutions, so with the help of the always reliable Ricardo Rincón I finally found out a working solution just duplicating dimension tables and creating dimension tables for everything (even comments and stuff like that). That was much better but not quite scalable. In real life things are ugly and tables have many columns. So while fighting with the same use case at work, I found a sneakier and much better solution that got rid of all those superfluous dimension tables reducing the need of them to just 2. While preparing the presentations I also worked a bit on the report layer and I’ll also share some techniques I came up with that can be helpful at some point. But enough of all this talking, let’s do what? Let’s get to it.

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Hello again. You didn’t think there would be a second part, right? well, me neither. But as things turn out, I had to work on another report dealing with snapshots, and this time they wanted something fancier. It took me a while to figure it out, but I like the result so I thought it would be nice to share. In the first part, we just showed what went up and what went down, being able to go back and check any snapshot. However, in many use cases that does not tell the whole story. To explain why something went up or down, you need to show what went in, what went out (sometimes important to tell which way it went) and maybe even if the value changed between snapshots. If we just compare 2 consecutive snapshots is not that hard, but things get trickier we take longer time spans and we want to account for everything that happened in between.

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Lately I’ve been building a report, which had not happened for a while, and I enjoyed the process. The final result too is simple yet effective, so I thought I would share the approach here because, yes, there is a calc group in place that does some of the magic.

This approach is valid when you want to follow the status of something, warehouse inventory, accounts pending to be conciliated, parking occupation. In all these situations, you are likely to be more interested in the latest snapshot than the previous ones, but at the same time you might be interested in the trends that lead to the present picture, and maybe even go back to a previous shapshot to have a look, without too many clicks. As you can see we’ll need to be smart about the date filter. For some elements we want the last snapshot only for others all of them, and yet we want we want the charts to interact.

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I realize that I use the word «arbitrary» a lot on my blog posts, but then I think, «so what?». Anyway, this blog post is mostly a remake on another blog post, the one called «A truly dynamic tooltip«. When I wrote that blog post, I had struggled a lot to get the effect I wanted, but even though I learned a lot in the process I ended up convinced that it was better to stay out of calculation groups when building such a chart. Well, this is no more. Calculation groups, are ususal, are just fine. You just need to know how to use them.

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I know, I’m back again at validations, but this time is a bit different. Recently I’ve found myselft in a project where the data that was coming in was not fulfilling the sepcified requirements. We tend to thing that data that comes out of a system will always be pristine, but well, at least in one instance it was not. There were some validations set in place in Access + VBA. But then, even if the access was set out to execute every day you have to go in, check the output, and each file had it’s own validation access. Well, not great. Since the patience was running thin (errors kept apprearing in different places) it was decided that a full validatino check was to be set out. Or at least something much deeper than we had now. I figured out that we might be able to build something in Power BI. Data Validation with Power BI. Odd? yes, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.

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Calculation Groups biggest contribution is to help us reduce the number of measures that we have to create and manage. However, sometimes, me might want measures again… Of course we can forgo the calc group altogether, but we might want to keep the centralized logic while having actual measures, and not measures + a filter as we usually do with calculation groups. The most relevant use case that comes to mind is when we do not want our calculation items to travel to the tooltip or drill through pages, as I discussed in this post not long ago. I guess that for most use cases, creating the measures manually is not the end of the world, but hey, scripting is fun and is cool, so let’s automate that a bit.

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After a long break due to a truckload of presentations (for my standards) here I’m back again with the blog.

I have a pile of ideas, but always the latest idea takes priority as it is hot, it’s burning in my head.

A guy from the Barcelona Power BI User Group asked me if calc groups could help him in a measure he was running. It’s like a measure of measures. There are several measures that represent different organizational KPIs, and they have a disconnected table in which there’s a target for each measure. He wants to know the percentage of targets that were met.

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