Calculating the number of new and returning customers is a recurring question. I would say this is a “classical” Business Intelligence problem, very common in marketing department. I worked on these problems with many customers, with small and large datasets, and I wrote a DAX Pattern “New and Returning Customers” showing how to calculate: New ...

I received this request in many courses, messages and also forum discussions: having an Analysis Services Tabular model, it would be nice being able to extract a correspondent PowerPivot data model. In order of priority, here are the specific feature people (including me) would like to see: Create an empty PowerPivot workbook with the same ...

I'm so happy that DAX Studio finally supports Excel 2013! As Darren Gosbell described in his blog, this release has a few internal changes that will better support future enhancements. I will port the code to capture the query plan for a query in this new release, but unfortunately it will require some weeks because I'm traveling a lot in these ...

During a PowerPivot Workshop course we received an interesting question from a student: “Can I use LASTNONBLANK (and FIRSTNONBLANK) with a column which is not a date column?” The reason is that we introduce LASTNONBLANK in the Advanced Time Intelligence module, because its typical use case is on a date column. However, you can use these functions ...

Apparently Excel does not offer a way to import data in Excel by using a DAX query on Analysis Services. The Data Connection Wizard seems to offers only the ability to create a PivotTable when you connect to Tabular, but not a Table (see the Table option disabled in the next picture). However, the workaround is to create a connection file and ...

The DATE function in DAX has this simple syntax: DATE( <year>, <month>, <day> ) If you are like me, you never read the BOL notes that says in a clear way that it supports dates beginning with March 1, 1900. In fact, I was wrongly assuming that it would have supported any date that can be represented in a Date data type in Data ...

Short update about community events in Europe where I will speak. On October 11 I will present DAX in Action in Köln - all details in the PASS local chapter here: http://www.sqlpass.de/Regionen/Deutschland/K%C3%B6lnBonnD%C3%BCsseldorf.aspx I will be speaking at a community event in Copenhagen on November 21, 2012. The session will be Excel 2013 ...