Quick Measures in Power BI

What if I told you there's no need to write laborious DAX expressions in Power BI? Doesn't that sounds great? I personally enjoy writing the DAX expressions from scratch because it helps to get to know the data well and you can tailor your calculations. But if you don't like writing the DAX expressions from square 1 then you should consider "Quick Measures". Power BI always makes your task easy in visualizing your data and quick measures are something that helps you to create measures in few seconds.

Doesn't that sound amazing? Yeah!! As the name suggests creating measures just by dragging and dropping is an accentuating feature of quick measures. I consider it to be the future of measures in Power BI. In this blog, I will showcase step by step process to create quick measures. I will be working on the Sample Superstore data.

You can find the quick measures right next to the new measure on the top or else you can right-click any of the available table options and you can easily find new quick measures. After selecting the quick measure you will land upon a toggle that will highlight all the measures available for your current dataset.


To start off we will focus on time intelligence functions. If you consider Tableau this is just to drag and drop but in Power BI if you do not use quick measures then you need to write the measure every time. Time intelligence functions help you to get the best out of your date function. Functions such as YTD, MTD, QTD are called time intelligence functions. To create it with the quick measure we will select the YTD in calculation and select the sum of sales and order date from fields respectively.

After that click ok and you will notice that a measure is created in your field and you can expand the measure to see the calculation behind it. Similarly, you can do the same for QTD and MTD calculations.



After digging the time intelligence functions let's move to running total. Running total is sometimes called cumulative total. The process is quite similar to the time intelligence function. After selecting ruuning total in the calculations you need to drag the average of sales and order date. 




Suppose you need to look for sales only from the east region. The possible solution is to apply a filter which can be done in quick measures too. You need to select the filter value in calculations and select the sum of sales and region. 














There is a pool of options available which can make your life easy and this list of calculations gets update frequently and every time you will get more add-ins calculations.The use of quick measures is a boon as it saves a lot of time while creating a measure. I firmly believe that quick measures will come heftier in the future as compared to measures.


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