DAX Cookbook

Over 120 recipes to enhance your business with analytics, reporting, and business intelligence

Greg Deckler

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839215223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Data Processing
• Index: Computer Science

Solve real-world business problems by learning how to create common industry key performance indicators and other calculations using DAX within Microsoft products such as Power BI, SQL Server, and Excel.

Key Features

• Learn to write sophisticated DAX queries to solve business intelligence and data analytics challenges
• Handle performance issues and optimization within the data model, DAX calculations and more
• Solve business issues with Microsoft Excel, Power BI, and SQL Server using DAX queries

Book Description

DAX provides an extra edge by extracting key information from the data that is already present in your model. Filled with examples of practical, real-world calculations geared toward business metrics and key performance indicators, this cookbook features solutions that you can apply for your own business analysis needs.

You'll learn to write various DAX expressions and functions to understand how DAX queries work. The book also covers sections on dates, time, and duration to help you deal with working days, time zones, and shifts. You'll then discover how to manipulate text and numbers to create dynamic titles and ranks, and deal with measure totals. Later, you'll explore common business metrics for finance, customers, employees, and projects. The book will also show you how to implement common industry metrics such as days of supply, mean time between failure, order cycle time and overall equipment effectiveness. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn to apply statistical formulas for covariance, kurtosis, and skewness. Finally, you'll explore advanced DAX patterns for interpolation, inverse aggregators, inverse slicers, and even forecasting with a deseasonalized correlation coefficient.

By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to use DAX's functionality and flexibility in business intelligence and data analytics.

What you will learn

• Understand how to create common calculations for dates, time, and duration
• Create key performance indicators (KPIs) and other business calculations
• Develop general DAX calculations that deal with text and numbers
• Discover new ideas and time-saving techniques for better calculations and models
• Perform advanced DAX calculations for solving statistical measures and other mathematical formulas
• Handle errors in DAX and learn how to debug DAX calculations
• Understand how to optimize your data models

Who this book is for

Business users, BI developers, data analysts, and SQL users who are looking for solutions to the challenges faced while solving analytical operations using DAX techniques and patterns will find this book useful. Basic knowledge of the DAX language and Microsoft services is mandatory.

Processing Project Performance

Projects are carefully planned endeavors that involve one or more individuals engaging in tasks that are designed to accomplish particular aims or goals. Most organizations engage in projects in one form or another. For example, an organization may wish to redesign its website. Often, this becomes a project with specific tasks designed to ensure that the website is redesigned and deployed on time and within a specific budget. Being carefully planned, projects have an array of metrics and KPIs that project managers find critical to their role: keeping project expenses within specified budgets and reaching the goals of the project within specified timelines. This chapter is all about how to calculate many of these key metrics and KPIs. By calculating and tracking these project metrics and KPIs, project managers can identify projects at risk of exceeding specified budgets and timelines; they can also measure overall project performance.

The following is a list of recipes in this chapter:

• Calculating utilization
• Projecting planned value
• Estimating earned value
• Achieving actual cost
• Creating project schedule variance
• Computing project cost variance
• Constructing burndown charts

Technical requirements

The following are required to complete all of the recipes in this chapter:

• Power BI Desktop
• This book's GitHub repository at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/DAX-Cookbook/tree/master/Chapter08

Calculating utilization

Utilization is the concept of comparing productive time to unproductive time. Utilization is generally expressed as a percentage and is calculated as the ratio between productive time and all productive and unproductive time. Utilization is often used in project management to determine where resources are being expended and can be helpful in finding project resources that are underutilized.

This recipe demonstrates how to calculate utilization, with productive time being categorized as billable time and unproductive time being categorized as non-billable time.

Getting ready

To prepare for this recipe, do the following:

1. Open Power BI Desktop.
2. Import the data from the Ch08R01Data.xlsx Excel file located in this book's GitHub repository. Ensure that the table that's created is called R01_Table.
3. Create a table called R01_Calendar using the following formula:

R01_Calendar = CALENDAR(DATE(2019,1,1),DATE(2019,3,31))

4. Create the following column in the R01_Calendar table:

Work Hours = IF(WEEKDAY('R01_Calendar'[Date],2) < 6,8,0)

5. Create a relationship between the Date columns in the R01_Table and R01_Calendar tables and ensure that Cross filter direction is set to Both.

Each row in the R01_Table table represents daily hours reported by employees against various projects and tasks within those projects. Each project has a unique JobID that identifies the project and each task has a TaskID that identifies the task within the project. In addition, each employee has a PayType that identifies the employee as either an internal resource (ADMINISTRATION) or as some form of billable employee (SALARY, HOURLY, SUB-CONTRACTOR). Finally, each combination of project and task code is given a Category of either Billable or a non-billable category such as Bench, Int Admin, or PTO.

The Work Hours column in the R01_Calendar table simply d...