Marco Russo's Blog
View full profileDates differences between Excel and DAX
DAX supports dates starting in 1900 and while teaching DAX I always explain that DAX manages dates like Excel, which is the reason why these limitations exist. Actually, this is true – but answering to a comment today I realized… Read more
The hidden secrets of TOTALYTD
DAX has many time intelligence functions that are often redundant, offering different shorter syntaxes for longer more generic functions. However, sometimes the shorter syntax could be dangerous, as I explain in this blog post where I suggest using CALCULATE and… Read more
Smart Filter Pro Preview
Today we start the preview of Smart Filter Pro. This is the first commercial custom visual produced by OKViz and it will be in preview until the end of 2018. Read more
Correct calculate of age in DAX from birthday
UPDATE 2019-10-18 Because of a bug in YEARFRAC function described in the original blog post and reported by Dominik Petri (thanks!), there are cases where the previous solution does not work well. Moreoever, YEARFRAC is not that fast, so a… Read more
How to write DISTINCTCOUNTX in DAX
I received a question about how to implement the equivalent of a DISTINCTCOUNTX function in DAX. Well, such a function doesn’t exist in DAX, but imagine you want to write something like: The corresponding measure working in DAX is: In… Read more
Change culture/collation of an Analysis Services Tabular database
When you create a Tabular model for Analysis Services, the Culture and Collation properties are set automatically and cannot be changed by the SSDT user interface in Visual Studio. The biggest issue is the workspace database, because these properties cannot… Read more
Time intelligence issues in DAX for fiscal years starting in March
If you have a fiscal year starting in March, you can have a problem using the time intelligence functions in DAX. For example, by using February 28, the fiscal year starts on February 29th in leap years. By using February… Read more
DAX Formatter now uses a different color for variables names
In the latest weeks I received several requests to support a different color for variable names in DAX Formatter, just as the formula editor available in Power BI. I finally implemented a solution that I consider a workaround, because of… Read more
Removing column filter in Power BI when Sort by Column is active
A recurring issue for Power BI users writing DAX code is that column filter removal might have an unexpected behavior when the Sort by Column is active on the column. I covered this topic in an article related to RANKX,… Read more
International year_end_date for YTD functions in DAX
If you used the DATESYTD and TOTALYTD functions in DAX, you might have noticed that the optional parameter year_end_date is a string defining the last day of the year. The default is December 31, so this parameter is used only… Read more