welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP edition of DAX Reimagined. I'm thrilled to welcome you to this journey.
If you've worked with DAX for any amount of time, you've probably run into a few common (and frustrating) challenges:
- Measures that produce unexpected results in complex reports
- Ratios or percentages that don’t calculate as you intended
- Matrix totals that don’t align with the values in the rows
- Slicers that override your logic in surprising ways
DAX is an incredibly capable language—but it comes with nuances that can make it feel unpredictable, especially if you’re used to SQL or other traditional programming languages. Unlike those tools, DAX doesn’t simply execute your logic top to bottom. Instead, it responds—quietly and behind the scenes—to filters created by visuals, slicers, and user interactions. These influences can introduce subtle (yet critical) changes in context that you may not have accounted for.
These “invisible filters” are what make DAX powerful—and, at times, frustrating.
This book is about turning that frustration into fluency. Instead of focusing solely on functions, DAX Reimagined explores how interactivity drives every calculation. In Power BI, user actions—like selecting a visual or clicking a slicer—automatically apply filters to your measures. Often, it’s these hidden filters that cause your results to differ from what you expected.