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Measure Management & DAX Editor

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DaveG on 09 Jan 2018 10:55:44

Anyone who uses PowerBI long enough has had a PBIX with 50-60 measures and it has become time consuming and tedious to mantain. In Excel you can do a quick find/replace to edit several formulas - in PowerBI you need to select each one individually. An "excel-like" interface for editing measures would save a lot of time! This would take PowerBI to the next level regarding productivity. I've prepared a mockup for this as well as a DAX Editor. Let me know what you think.

Mockup: https://i.imgur.com/z6TBOQb.png?1

Administrator on 20 Aug 2020 01:21:25

Checking with Will Thompson and moving status to backlog

Comments (115)
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4ecc8570 1d51-4b40-a5d2-48df0574f8ac on 16 Aug 2020 04:00:58

RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor

Great idea! Plus creating a new measure in my model takes over 3 mins before I can start typing. Imaging if I make a typo or syntax error on top of that? Im pushing 8-9 mins if I make a mistake.

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1e753da8 650d-4de6-8d63-8abe5ec68a75 on 16 Aug 2020 04:00:58

RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor

Great point Michael! What may also be handy is to have a toggle like in Excel to temporarily disable re-calculations until all your edits are done. This way you can make all your edits and not have to wait for the model to re-calculate after each edit.

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1e753da8 650d-4de6-8d63-8abe5ec68a75 on 16 Aug 2020 04:00:55

RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor

One huge benefit that this measure management system solves that is not mentioned above is it allows users to easily copy ALL measures and calculated columns from one PBIX to another. They can also be extracted to an Excel file for easy reference.

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1e753da8 650d-4de6-8d63-8abe5ec68a75 on 16 Aug 2020 04:00:55

RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor

Thank you for all those who have voted so far!

If any Microsoft Teams are reading this I'd like to note that when I mention "excel-like" interface - it does not need any fancy functionality - a simple editable table like shown in the mockup would be an enormous time saver. Further functionality can be added later (like tracing dependents, formula drag-down, DAX syntax coloring, etc), but this basic editable table would be a 1000x improvement compared to clicking each measure individually. Imagine needing to create 50 measures: currently you need to press "Create new measure" and edit the formula each one at a time. With this proposed design you can create them once in PowerBI OR quickly in a table in Excel, and then simply paste them all into the existing PBIX or any other going forward. This would make collaborating between team members much easier, as well as allow you to seamlessly create standardized measure templates for all team members to use. Thanks for reading.

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cda9d1ec 00e5-436b-9ff7-3bb3c97096cb on 16 Aug 2020 04:00:55

RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor

Very good idea!