Retrieve measures used within a Power BI report by making use of DAX Studio

Do you ever want a quick glimpse of the various measures used in a report, without having to click on each measure in Power Bi to view? Or maybe you want to re-use some of the previous measures that you’ve created. Well then, this blog is the one that contains the solution that you’ve been searching for.

In this blog, you will be introduced to DAX Studio. DAX Studio is a handy tool that can be used from time to time, in conjunction with Power BI. This blog will show you how to download and install DAX Studio, as well as providing the commands that you would need to run, in order to view the measures from your Power BI Report.

Download and install DAX Studio

Downloading and installing DAX Studio is such a simple and quick process. All you need to do is to navigate to the website: https://daxstudio.org/

Then once you’re there you can just click on the green icon as seen below:

DAX Studio to view measures

Once the download is complete, it’s as simple as following the installation prompts, by just pressing next through the following steps:

Download is ready

Install for all users

Accept and Agree

Install and run DAX Studio

DAX Studio

 

Finish

Retrieving all measures from PBI schema

Now for the fun part: viewing and documenting your Measures.

Before you run (launch) DAX Studio, after your download, make sure that you have your Power BI file for which you want the view the measures, already open.

Now, you can open DAX Studio, where you will see the following window:

(For this example, I have a Covid Report that I’m working on, open in the background, hence the pop up below.)

DAX Studion Homescreen

Now, select the PBI/SSDT Model.

PBI SSDT Model

Then press Connect

On the DAX Studio home screen, you need to type the following:

select name and expression to view all measures

 

Then press Run to execute the query that you’ve just created.

Execute query

The resultant output should look like this:

Output for viewing all measures from power bi report

The above results are given in a grid view by default within DAX Studio.

View results in a file format

If you want to export this data, you can set the Output to a CSV file and then run the same command again.

To do this, navigate to Output and select Excel:

Output to CSV file

Then press run again.

Execute query

 

Now you will be prompted to save the file. I would recommend saving it as a Comma separated text file. Because then you can open it in excel. And then just add a file name.

View Measures in Excel

The result of which will be a CSV file, that you can open in Excel.

Name and expression

And that’s it, as easy as pie.


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