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)
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
This would help with visibility to our expressions too. I'm always looking back through expressions to see what other fields were referenced and it is very time consuming. Half the time, I feel like I am blind, while working on new expressions. I'd love to be able to see them all simultaneously, especially when one must be calculated first and then another and another. It would help to be able to see all of them at once to see the flow.
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
While you're at it, it would be great to create a repository or library where you can export your Dax measures and share them among your many dashboards. So often I find myself creating the same measures over and over (not from scratch but thru copy paste). I started copying my measures into Excel and then keep that as my repository, but it would be great if we could "Export measures to library" so we could share. To see all measures that you've created in one place would be great!
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
This will definitely help to speed up development. Especially during tedious copy/paste - change column/metric name in formula!
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
You could develop a graphical interface where formulas are boxes with inputs and outputs and links to data tables and other formula boxes! See software like Blender 3D (Nodes) or 3DSmax! It's so boring to learn a language for every application!
When will Microsoft take the step of the 90s in terms of user interface?
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
I moved my workaround solution to GitHub : https://github.com/didierterrien/Power-BI-assistant
Very good tutorial about it by Ruth Pozuelo (Curbal) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7n_cLjtTw
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
Sounds like a great idea. Some of the great features of DAX Studio could be brought into the DAX editor.
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
For measures alone, you can actually use Tabular Editor https://tabulareditor.github.io/, although it is unsupported. Tabular Editor lets you connect to a running instance of Power BI Desktop, or to open a .pbit file. You can also export/import measure properties (such as format strings, descriptions, expressions) to a .TSV file for batch editing in Excel. See https://github.com/otykier/TabularEditor/wiki/Useful-script-snippets#export-object-properties-to-a-file for more details.
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
ALso would be a good idea to include the ability to check mark which measures should be active. If you dump a copy and paste set of measures from another workbook, you don't want them all to try and resolve to the new set of data tables until you have made the necessary changes to table and column names. Also, a search and replace function for this formula management area would be welcome.
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
> 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.
The ability to paste a whole bunch of measures all into one window (the ability to specify the home table where they will reside would be nice too) would be a KILLER feature for me!!!
Amazing mockup by the way OP.
RE: Measure Management & DAX Editor
Your mockup is great! Best work put into an idea so far :)