Reporting dimensions are all fields that you can see in the Fields menu, which are used to populate reports. Basically, these are the columns in the table model. Also, they can be Calculated Columns or Measures. In some earlier “recipes” I talked about how to create them in PowerPivot model, and now I will show you how to do perform this in PowerBI Desktop. Also, I will mention another interesting novelty: Calculated Tables!
In one of the earlier posts I wrote about that PowerBI comes in many “flavors”: as a Cloud Service (PowerBI.com) as a development environment (PowerBI Desktop), as application for mobile devices available on Windows, Android and iOS platforms (PowerBI Mobile). Since the majority of you who are reading these lines deal with reports development I decided to demonstrate you, in a practical example, how to use PowerBI Desktop.
In one of previous recipes we were talking about basic concepts of DAX, where you’ve got acquainted with calculated columns. Now let’s say something about how to manipulate them within the table that exist in the Data model. First, we will show how to filter them, then how to remove filters and how to perform sorting. Then we will be talking about adding a new column, “freezing” and “unfreezing” columns, changing the column width, renaming…
DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a language used to create expressions (formulas) for making the reporting dimensions that are used in Power Pivot tables. Once created these expressions can be both used within tabular model of Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. A large number of DAX functions have the same syntax as Excel functions, while others can work with relational data and perform dynamic aggregation of data, their filtering etc.