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DAX in Practice: Text and Data Transformations

by Andrew McSwiggan

Developers and analysts need to format text strings and timestamps in different ways to aid visual analysis. This course will teach you how to use DAX functions to create new text and date columns that can be used for presenting data in Power BI.

What you'll learn

Developers and analysts need to analyze sales data by different product attributes such as type, size, and color, and by different time ranges such as week, month, and year. You need to extract and transform this base data into a series of new text and date columns to use in your analysis to slice, dice, and present the data in Power BI. One way to achieve this is to use the DAX language which is available inside every Power BI report to change the shape of the data.

In this course, DAX in Practice: Text and Data Transformations, you’ll learn how to write basic DAX code to manipulate text and date columns to extract parts of the data, format it, and store it in new columns in your Power BI report.

First, you’ll learn how to extract text positions within a text string with DAX and use these positions to navigate the text string and cut out different parts of the text. Next, you'll learn about the challenges of analyzing data over time, and how to manipulate datetime columns with DAX to solve these problems. Finally, you’ll learn how to save the results of these DAX formulas into new columns in Power BI.

When you’re finished with this course, you’ll know how to create new text and date columns in Power BI with DAX.

About the author

Passionate about Business Intelligence and delivering knowledge and insight to support better decisions. An advocate of Self-Service Reporting and Analytics and a Data Visualisation evangelist. Andi has delivered face to face Business Intelligence training to many industries, covering topics such as Report Design, Semantic Layer, Dimensional modeling and Data Visualisation. Andi has led many Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence development projects and is well versed in taking complex an... more

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