Is there a secret recipe to create a beautiful dashboard? Why do we need to use “beautiful”? Would “useful” be a better adjective? If you think for a moment, you know that we are attracted by the “beautiful”. It is important for a first impression, but  Read more

In the last few years, I and Alberto Ferrari assisted many users of Power Pivot and Power BI who wanted to create their reports using these tools and were struggling with getting the desired numbers from their data. The first approach of an Excel user  Read more

I recently wrote an article about duplicated names in DAX to highlight a possible case where you can have a measure with the same name of a column. This is not a good idea, mainly because the syntax to reference a measure and a column is identical, and  Read more

More than one year ago, I and Alberto Ferrari started to work on DirectQuery, exploring the new implementation appeared in Analysis Services 2016 for the Tabular models, which uses the same engine of Power BI. The previous version of DirectQuery appeared  Read more

One of the side effects that you might not expect from a table filter in a CALCULATE statement is the removal of an existing filter. In reality, this is a condition that happens when you write an explicit CALCULATE in a row context, because the table  Read more

I recently wrote an article to described in more details the syntax of the IN operator in DAX , which is available in Power BI and in the CTP of the next release of Analysis Services. Jeffrey Wang wrote a blog post about the IN operator a few months ago,  Read more

One year ago I wrote an article describing how the time intelligence DAX functions work in Power BI (I just updated the article including the example described below). In a recent event in Sydney I observed a strange (or at least unexpected) behavior  Read more

One of the latest addition to DAX has been the ability to apply an external filter context to SUMMARIZECOLUMNS, which makes this function a perfect replacement for SUMMARIZE in DAX. In The Definitive Guide to DAX I introduced such a function, but at the  Read more

When you use the time intelligence functions in DAX, it is relatively easy to filter the same dates selection in the previous year by using the SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR or DATEADD functions. However, if you follow the best practices, it is likely that you have  Read more

If you work with Power Pivot, Power BI, or Analysis Services Tabular, you probably already know VertiPaq Analyzer. If you never used it, with the new release 1.7 you have another couple of very good reason to try it. VertiPaq Analyzer is a Power Pivot  Read more