Introducing PowerPivot DAX Measures

Up until this point, I’ve just used DAX (PowerPivot’s extension to the Excel formula language) to create calculated columns in the PowerPivot window.

There’s a lot of utility in DAX calc columns, but that’s not where DAX really shines.  DAX measures let you do things in Pivot reports that simply weren’t possible in Excel before.

In the last video, I mentioned that merely showing raw sales amount didn’t really tell me whether my products sold better or worse in varying temperatures, since there are varying numbers of days of each temperature – perhaps the relatively low sales on Hot days is just because there weren’t many Hot days?