I’d like to share with you one of my favorite topics in Power BI, which involves DAX formulas. It’s a development concept or strategy called measure branching.
Measure branching is key to getting really advanced in Power BI. I use this technique and you’ll see me apply it often in many of my tutorials.
In simple terms, measure branching is creating a measure out of a measure or measures. I always start with core calculations because simple DAX formulas are the beginning of anything advanced. These core calculations are the start of any branch or layers of measure branching.
To understand this concept better, I’m going to provide in this article some of my tutorials that demonstrate this measure branching technique.
The first tutorial is from a training workshop that I did in Enterprise DNA, which was about discovering advanced insights in Power BI. In this report, I have QoQ (quarter on quarter) Sales Performance. But then from that, I derived a moving average or trending analysis based on QoQ Sales Performance.
Watch the full video tutorial below and see how I achieve this (and more) using measure branching.
The next tutorial that I want to show you is dealing with margins and revenues. In this tutorial, you’ll be looking at an analytical insight where you find out if the profit margins grew together with the revenue. This analysis can be done easily using the measure branching technique.
Here’s the full video tutorial where I walk through each step on how I came up with the calculations as well as the visualizations.
This is another tutorial that I want you to see. Here, I show you how you can get a very unique insight with Power BI but in an intuitive way. In this example, I focus on margin growth in the sales of an organization but take it even further and rank all the salespeople according to how they performed on a particular metric.
You’ll see in the video tutorial how I branch the DAX measures several times to get the margin growth. Then, I overlay a ranking technique to discover the top salespeople.
I hope you learn a lot from these tutorials. I highly recommend implementing this measure branching technique in your own work.
Check out the links below and visit our website for more tutorials and examples related to measure branching.
Key Take Away
This Power BI technique or development strategy really just simplifies things a lot. You don’t need to create long and complex formulas. There’s no need to make it complicated. As you can see from the tutorials that I’ve shared in this post, none of the formulas are complicated or overwhelming and difficult to understand.
It’s all about overlaying core measures and simple formula patterns, then putting the correct calculations or branch of measure inside it.
As I always say, start with simple core measures. After that, you can branch out and do more advanced calculations by means of iteration. Then, you’ll realize that you can actually have multiple branches of measures from one core measure that you’ve created.
All the best!
Sam
***** Related Links *****
Measure Branching – The Most Important Concept When Using DAX In Power BI
Calculations In Power BI Using Measure Branching
Advanced DAX Functions: Calculating Profit Contribution
***** Related Support Forum Posts *****
Cumulative Total with a Measure Branched Measure That Utilizes TREATAS
Column Totals Not Matching Sum of Rows
For more measure branching support queries to review see here....
Be the first to comment