TAME the the beast that is DAX in Power BI (aka how to learn DAX) 

I feel like Dax functions follow the pareto principle in that around 20% of the functions are used 80% of the time. That being said, maybe a follow up video on your 20% to learn right out of the gate as a sign post would help a lot of people out. Certainly Calculate will be in there. Great video Patrick!

Patrick, your videos have been an immense help over the years, thanks. Please continue to make more!

Great video Patrick. I love these “teach you how to learn” style videos mixed in with the straight forward “here’s how this feature works” style ones.

What's weird is that I found a programming language like c++ made perfect sense, but dax confuses the hell out of me lol

Your videos always help out! This one was exceptional; I have been underutilizing DAX Studio and now I'm going to keep it up all the time to work through problems. Amazing; thanks!

The ability to visually see the output of tables in DAX studio as one iterates through their DAX formula was a game changer for me in terms of learning DAX, great stuff!

Another great example of how to use the tool to help you use the tool. Love it! Have started playing with DAX Studio, but this is the first video that illustrates HOW to use it. DAX Guide is no joke - excellent resource for learning and frequently used bookmark (as is Guy In A Cube!). Keep up the great work!

It definitely was a great help to have a showcase of the iterative process of a DAX measure creation. I usually directly write the statement in Power BI without understanding what happens behind the scene. I tend to under-utilize DAX Studio and now I will start having the habit of using it more. Thank you for the knowledge sharing!

This is exactly what I have been looking for all these days- for someone to put it all together for me. Sure, we can learn all the bits and pieces here and there but no one tied the strings together like you did in this video. This is awesome, thanks so much for the tutorial!

Brilliant video Patrick! Been catching up on a few of your videos recently and they're all really good - and this one was even better! I learned to treat DAX like SQL (or any other language, for that matter) and to start small and build up your query from there. Great tip about using a test dataset too.

Thanks for this example Patrick, It's really a gift how you can explane and put a smile on my face every single time! You tamed the DAX beast a bit more for me thanks again.

Really this cleared lots of hurdles in learning to write DAX functions. Thanks a lot, Patrick! God Bless you!

Patrick you are awesome! Thank you for all your amazing videos.

So grateful for this video. Major Big up and respect Patrick and Adam

WOW.. too good Patrick, that's what I was searching for!! Thanks

Fantastic, thanks ! I’m so used to excel where you can (more easily ) verify your outputs and iterate quickly. I see now I need to get into DAX studio properly!

I've been watching Guy In a Cube for a few days now. When I noticed the problem where the December date was returned, EOMONTH(,0) came to mind. Then when I saw you type it... I felt so smart. The COALESCE function has also been of great use to me. Thank you for what you guys do. You have earned a subscriber.

Great Video Patrick!!! I loved the three step approach of learning how to learn the functions. 👍

Totally cool...especially at the end with &" /3" to make it appear as a fraction instead of trying to make it an actual fraction. Brilliant.

Love this work flow and the use of a small dataset and then iterating through using DAX Studio. Big thumbs up

Great video Patrick, passing it on to lots of other people. Thanks!

Nice video Patrick. Dax is a tricky beast. I find the dax website often is very techy and not written in plain simple to understand English. And doesn't always provide an example of the function in action unlike the Microsoft sql server examples like on the help websites from ms. The query action in dax studio makes you need to understand summerizecols as power bi offers measure writing without the need to understand how to query the dax engine. Which isnt simple to understand at first. I'd say its tailored more to excel formula devs and not those used to writing expressions in ssrs for example. I think this is why people are finding it tricky in general to learn. There is also the star schema concept to understand first aswell as the model determines the difficulty of the measures.

*Mind blown* Game changer. Thank you!

Awesome Video Patrick. I love being taught how to “fish”.

You are an awesome PBI teacher! 🤗💥 Thanks !

Pure Gold this video!

Really cool video ! I need to start spending more time with DAX Studio after watching this !

Thank you, It was very helpful

Thank you! Great video!

Just learning PBI/Power query and of course DAX - this and other videos on this page feel very useful

Awesome. That's all you need validate and iterate in dax. Helpful video Patrick 🎉

Thank you for making Power BI DAX FUN!!!!

Great video Patick..... Tks

By far the best video I've ever seen on this topic

I learn DAX with Guy in a Cube !!!! Thank you for sharing...

Great overview of how to learn DAX functions Patrick! Thanks for this tip on this tool!

Excellent Video Patrick, Thanks a lot

Great video Patrick, thanks again!

“I’m not teaching you how to write DAX, I’m teaching you how to *learn* to write DAX” Love this. Also, where has COALESCE been my whole DAX life!? Thanks Patrick!

Hi Patrick.. I am also using excel file data to make any complicated dax.. by debugging every step to know the result... your really great..

Niiiice. The only thing that I do different to this is that I always define the measure at the top of the query. It keeps it outside of my query for debugging, but also means I can reference it in other queries if I want.

One of the best Dax videos i've watched so far and no it's not my first one haha.

Great video. Thank you. Ive been struggling to model a very messy dataset, they have so many unecessary columns, and i had to spend a lot of time validating how to produce the calculations needed for the reports. This has been an experience for sure

Fantastic video!

DAX isn't hard ... it's just challenging. Different word, same thing IMO!

Excellent video, thanks a lot for the help and guidance!

Super helpful!!

Thanks Patrick.. Very helpful

Amazing, thanks

Moment when and how use CALCULATE in this case is great way of learning how to write DAX step by step. Great example!

What do I think? Love your videos and great tips especially on this topic. Many thanks!

this is awesome!

Love your videos! Go Hogs!

The Definitive Guide To DAX helping me a lot

Amazing video thanks Patrick!

Such a good "meta-lesson"!

Thanks Patrick, this is a cool video as always and a great use of DAX studio! I personally find that the big challenges in teaching DAX to 'citizen developers' are the concepts of relations and filter context, so far from Excel but so powerful and yielding 'cleaner' models. My take is, if you are not properly teached about these concepts, you will struggle in understanding the functions, as you suggest. Any recommendation for resources that my 'citizen developers' can look at on these topics?

Coooooooooool!!!!!! Thank you! I learned from this video that it´s only normal if I don´t "get it" yet. Now I can start to tame that beast - reeeeeal cautiously :-)

Patric thanks for showing art of writing DAX :)

That’s a good one 👍 Thanks!

Really helpful 👍

amazing !!!

Sometimes DAX could be frustrating when you are starting to learn, these techniques definetely help a lot to make it easier.

Thanks! 👍

Oh I love this.

Zabar Dast ( Wonder full)

Awesome!!!

Hello! Your videos is amazing! Could you create a video teaching us how to create "First Pass Yield" chart?

Patrick! This is fantastic stuff as always... BUT, tell us honestly, how much time did it actually take you both to design it in your mind and execute. One thing is true. It needs time and patience and of course change in mindset to go to the DAX world....

Very nice video Patrick and the team. I wish there was a dax debugger that will allow us to focus on each formula expression easily: What a function argument expects, what it actually get, what is return. When the DAX is short and the data is simple or premade you can find the problem easily. On the other hand longer DAX formulas and larger data may have unexpected values which makes the whole thing much more challenging. Adding to that, sometimes in order to really understand what a function does and how it works, you need to experience it on your own data.. it is much easier to do so anyway.. rather than building a sample data every time you want to check something out. Totally appreciate the video, it does helps a bit, yet in order to really "tame the beast" we need a serious tool.. :)

Fantastic video Patrick! I wish my company could use time functions, but we're non-fiscal. Makes it tons harder as there are no pre-built functions to deal with time for me.

Good video brother

Great Video! It is helping me with my "column addction", where you get addicted to use custom columns! haha

very very very very thank, and thank to pt-br subs =) you are unbelievable, tame the Dax, tame Powr BI, Tame the Data \o/

Los vídeos de este canal tienen muchas menos vistas de las que realmente merecen, gracias por compartir tanto

Great!!

Great tip! But if you have more than one visit per month, how does the formula behave?

Coming from python. ..this is just learning a new syntax Dammit!

Omg you were my professor at southern

I want to count the days of operation based on the start date, a sampling date, until there is an end date. This to be able to calculate how many days of the month are applied and to be able to pay my associates.

I'm gonna go after anyone who dislikes this masterpiece

one rule , Patrick ruleZ

Hi Patrick Can we give chance to user change the visuals/charts dynamically (I mean we can give set of visuals in slicer so user can select in slicer which is required eg: bar chart, line chart ) I know it is not related to this video any input's will helpful. Thanks

Great video! I really like the Guy in a Cube videos! I am new to Power BI but I am facing a “funny” problem. I wonder if you can give me some hints. I am analyzing COVID data. The data comes in 3 different data series: 1. By date when the result of the test was delivered 2. By date when the test was performed 3. By date when the person first felt a symptom All the measures apply in similar way to all 3 series. 8 have completed one series and have a zillion measures. So I am looking for something like SUBROUTINES in DAX. I though that Calculation Groups could be of help but I just saw the Tabular Editor is actually a paid tool and I wish to stick with free tools as I am just doing this for fun. I would like to have a visual where I can select the data series and I can also select the measure to show Can you give me some tips? I am studying PARAMETERS as it seems a possible way to do it Any help is welcome! Greetings from Guatemala Carlos

Consider the beast tamed!

I was wondering how much DAX Studio should I use. It turns out a lot!

in 6:24 how does the summarizecolumns function knows "visits" is the name of measure and the measurement calculation is countrows(clientisits). because the syntax of summarizecolumns functions shows a complete different sort of values.

What about period based on (from) selected month?

Hi Patrick.. i hope you are doing good.. i have an issue.. i cannt see the External tools tab in my ribbon even when i have installed the latest version of it, i even went through the video by Adam but of no help . could you please suggest anything

Didn't know about the coalesce Function! Always going with if isbank thing. This is much shorter

It strikes me that Kyos was looking to segment his/her customer list with the assignment of the distinct count of months over the last 3 months that the customer visited. It's not an issue of visit counts, it's an issue of visit-month counts. My proposal for the calculated column on the client table: Client[Visit Segment] = VAR _datebeg = EOMONTH ( TODAY (), -3 ) + 1 VAR _dateend = TODAY () VAR _monthcount = CALCULATE ( DISTINCTCOUNT ( 'Calendar'[MonthEndDate] ), FILTER ( 'Calendar', ( 'Calendar'[Date] >= _datebeg ) && ( 'Calendar'[Date]

"It's not hard, it's just challenging"

Hi Patrick, Can you explain how to pull values from different columns in a second table based on the values from a column in the first table.. Say if I have values (2020, 2021 etc) in a year column in Table A, based on those values selected, I need to pull the value from column 2020 or from Column 2021 in table B. It would be really helpful.

Patrick, you have tried to make this very simple. But where is the starting point of a guy like me who is entering into such a Pandora's box? Which you feel are the simplest functions I should start with?

I think DAX is challenging because the functions are not very well explained in the doco as they can be ambiguous, with many use cases. None the less, I still manage to get my DAX queries working in the end..

I was working with a donut chart today. The client wanted to see the breakdown per category, but they also wanted to see the total. I noticed that donut chart has so much room in the middle. Why can't they give us an option to display the total there.

This is the best way to learn DAX :) But one can also learn it by reading blogs from others :)

Yooo

Last time only Pragmatic Works

I would add: watch all the videos from @ferrarialberto and anything else that shows up at sqlbi. For dax that's the way.