DAX Archives – Page 2 of 3

Right Aligning Text in Power BI: Format Improvements for Easy Profit&Loss Reports

Edit 14-Dec-2017: Now that we can right-align text measures in PowerBI, a SWITCH-measure like here: http://www.thebiccountant.com/2017/04/24/kpis-in-easy-profit-and-loss-for-powerbi/#comment-719 is the best alternative in my eyes. No need to read on 🙂

As shown in my last part of the Easy P&L-series, Power BI unfortunately still lacks some fundamental formatting options like:

Right aligning text (please vote for it here: Right align text in Power BI – edit 15th Nov: We’re there: Right aligning text is available now: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-november-2017-feature-summary/)
Display numbers in different formats within one column (either to be implemented as a “neutral” format for Switch-measures, where the referenced measures carry the formatting attributes already, or as a part of a formula-based conditional formatting) (Thanks Matt for the voting-link: Conditional format SWITCH measure)

So for the moment I choose between the following workaround-options:

Display %-values in a separate column
Format numbers as text and fill up with spaces so that all end up right aligned
See the suggestion from Matt Allington in the comments below (very nice)

Right aligning text or percentage figure in new column

For both options the preparations are the same:

Number.Mod rescue pack for Power BI and Power Query

If you use the M-function Number.Mod in Power BI or Power Query and expect the same result like in Excel or DAX, you are probably in good company.

But if the signs of the number and the divisor are not the same, M will differ from Excel and DAX:

Number.Mod in M is different

This is by design, so you can use this this formula instead, if you need matching results:

[Number] – [Divisor] * Number.RoundDown( [Number] / [Divisor] )

Enjoy & stay queryious 🙂

Bill of Material (BOM) Explosion Part2: Costing in Excel and PowerBI

Following up on the BOM-explosion: A comment reminded me that I had missed to present the costing techniques to calculate the total costs of each (sub)-product.

Reversing the aggregation direction

What I had shown is how to “aggregate” from parent down to child-level to retrieve the total quantity of each component within a BOM (“How many of each (sub-) components do we have to order (or build) for that bike?”) (1).

Now we reverse the aggregation direction and aggregate the total (!) quantities back up to the parents (2).

And, as this doesn’t make too much sense in an economical way, the second aggregation will be their prices (3). This will give us the sum of all part-costs (“How much will the order of all the parts cost us?”). This is also very useful for planning purposes or reconciliation of prices for intermediate products with your master data.

And if your model holds sales-data as well, you can calculate the totals costs of your total sales within each period. (4)

VAR 1: Using classical hierarchies

Bill of Materials (BOM) solution in Excel and PowerBI

Edit 12-Jan-18: Code and file updated (robustness & speed)

Handling multilevel bill of materials (BOM) without VBA in Excel and PowerBI is now a piece of cake: Just pass 4 parameters into the M-function below and it will return a table that holds everything you need for:

Explosion
Order list (“total quantities”)

3. Implosion (“where used”): Will be covered in next blogpost

The format of the input-data for this function needs to be like the example used from the Adventure Works 2008-database, where all products on the top of the hierarchy also have an entry in the child-column (the components), leaving the parent column blank:

BOM-Function

KPIs in Easy Profit and Loss for PowerBI

Welcome to the last part of my Easy Profit & Loss series where I will cover KPIs in rows & columns:

1) KPIs in columns

Show all your figures as a percent of turnover for example: Nice & easy: Divide current figure by the total sum of turnover:

Turnover% =
ABS (
    DIVIDE (
[ActSign],
        CALCULATE (
[ActSign],
            FILTER (
                ALL ( IndividualAccountsLayout ),
IndividualAccountsLayout[Description in Report] = “Income”
            )
        )
    )
)

We need to leave the current row context to retrieve the turnover-value in each row, therefore the ALL.

2) KPIs in rows

Use Slicers for Query Parameters in PowerBI

Reading Rob Collie’s latest cool blogpost on how to retrieve slicer selections in Power BI, I couldn’t stop thinking of how awesome it would be, if we could use this technique to pass slicer selections as query parameters to the M-queries in the query editor. Not only would we have a very convenient user interface, but – what’s actually more important at the moment – we could pass multiple values as parameters to our queries, as this is not possible at all currently:

But how to fetch them? Rob’s post simply uses cross-filtering to show the values in a separate visual. In Excel we have cubefunctions where we can pass the slicer(-selection) as a parameter. Igor Cotruta, who is describing beautiful PBI-hacks on his blog here, kindly helped me out on this: “Via DMVs. Check $system.discover_sessions for the field sessions_last_command”. This worked perfectly into the following function, in which you just have to pass the name of the measure as a parameter:

Make sure that you have used that measure on one of your visuals, as otherwise the function cannot harvest it. Also you have to first save the file and then push the refresh-button in order to trigger the correct refresh. The above function sort of “reads the current PBI file from outside”, so it will only see the saved version.

When you do the first refresh, a dialogue will pop up, where you just have to accept the default values like this:

The example in the file below fetches temperature data where every selected year will create a unique URL and the results of all those calls is consolidated into one table. But of course, this technique can also be used to pass multiple parameter values to SQL-commands or others.

A final note: The query to extract the slicer parameters from the DAX-statement is not particularly robust and you might have to adjust it, if your slicer-selection-strings contain special characters.

Download for logged-in subscribers: SlicerParameter2.zip

Edit 25-Sep-2017: Adjusted the code to retrieve PortID.

Also: You have to disable privacy-settings for this code to run. And: This is a solution that will only work in Power BI Desktop and not in the service.

Recap:

If you create a new measure or adjust this file to your settings, you have to use the new measure in report somewhere and save the file. This is necessary to “initialize” the measure to your model so that it can be seen in the query editor.
From then on, when you use it: Just change the selection in your slicer and click “Refresh”