Data Bear’s Monday Motivation Blog Post

In this blog post we will show you how to use Power BI’s built in functionality, Quick Measures. Quick Measures is build on Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) and there is no need to write any DAX yourself. Simply provide fields to your dialog box in Quick Measures and Power BI does all the calculations in the background. It is a great way to kick of your DAX and Measures journey if you are still new to DAX.

Speedy Intelligent Measures

Measures in Power BI helps transforms data as data often requires more complex calculations to answer some questions. Measures can be used for some of the most simplistic calculations such as sum, average, min and max values and many more. Let’s start with an example to see how you can use quick measures to get to these insights.

We will go to the table and right click the three dots and select ‘New Quick Measures’.

Quick Measure

Here we see our table with all the fields on the right hand side of the pop-up. On the left hand side of the pop-up we see the calculations area that will be used to build our measure.

Quick Measure

When clicking on the calculation field a drop-down appears with six calculation category options with multiple calculations under these six categories.

The six categories are:

  • Aggregate per category
  • Filters
  • Time intelligence
  • Totals
  • Mathematical operations
  • Text

Let’s select the average revenue per category as we want to see the average revenue per product by sales region. Now, simply drag and drop the fields into the dialogue box to get to the average revenue per Product.

Quick Measure

Great, we can see that a measure called Average Revenue per Product was added. Let’s also drag this measure into our table to display the average revenue per product and region.

Quick Measure

Let’s take a closer look at the DAX syntax from the quick measures in Power BI.

Average Revenue per Product =
AVERAGEX(
    KEEPFILTERS(VALUES(‘Sales'[Product])),
    CALCULATE(AVERAGE(‘Sales'[Revenue]))
)

That’s all for our Monday Power BI tips blog post. Quick Measures in Power BI is a powerful tool to have in your modeling toolbox in order to provide quick insights to your data. For more  info on DAX please visit some of our other blog posts.

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