When working with DAX, you will benefit from following some best practices. Applying these will help you create fast models, make it easier to maintain your models in the long term, and allow you to better support others who create Power BI reports or other output from your models.

Think in terms of DAX measures primarily

If we did not make ourselves clear enough above: your main DAX tool should be DAX measures. These are highly dynamic, do not make the model larger, and there is no calculation you cannot do through a measure.

As a rule of thumb, calculated columns and calculated tables are a no-go, until you have very good arguments for using them!

Build explicit measures

We recommend creating explicit DAX measures instead of using numeric columns from (fact) tables directly in visual reports. There are several reasons for this:

• A measure is created by the Power BI model anyway when you use a column in a report, and it is easy...