Dynamic last December previous year with DAX

[Anonymous]

I'm rather new with the DAX formulas and I had a bit of trouble to resolve this issue in SSAS Tabular recently. I did solve it but I am wondering if it was the right way to do it?

My customer wanted a measure that would show the outcome of their projects. The measure should show the outcome from the project start date to December 31 PREVIOUS year. And it had to be dynamic since we don't know what year last December is. The customer wanted a pivot table in Excel to show the measure.

I tried a lot of DAX-date formulas but I didn't get it to work. But eventually I ended up with the following solution: I created a hidden measure called "LastPeriodPreviousYear" and it looked like this:

 LastPeriodPreviousYear:= LASTDATE(PREVIOUSYEAR(Period[Month_Date]))

Then I created a new measure that used LastPeriodPreviousYear, and it look like this:

Outcome PTD last year:= CALCULATE ( SUM ( MOD001[Amount] ); DATESBETWEEN ( Period[Month_Date]; BLANK (); [LastPeriodPreviousYear] ) )

These two calculations gave me the result that I wanted, and the customer is satisfied. But! I am curious and I want to learn. Is there a simpler/better/more good looking way to solve this matter? Thanks in advance!

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous That's a decent solution using Time "Intelligence". If you ever need a non-TI solution, you may find this helpful - https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/To-bleep-With-Time-Intelligence/ba-p/1260000

Also, see if my Time Intelligence the Hard Way provides a different way of accomplishing what you are going for.

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Quick-Measures-Gallery/Time-Intelligence-quot-The-Hard-Way-quot-TITHW/m-p/434008

[Anonymous]

@Greg_Deckler Think you nailed your description of the DAX Time intelligence! 😂

[amitchandak]

@Anonymous , You get in the following way last year-end date for standard calendar

last year end date = Date(year(today()),12,31)

last year end date = Date(year(today()),12,31)

last year end date = Date(year(eomonth(Period[Month_Date],0)),12,31)

[Anonymous]

@amitchandak Thanks for your reply. I've tried to use those formulas but I ended up with this error: "Error: Calculation error in measure 'MOD001'[Testa]: A single value for column 'Month_Date' in table 'Period' cannot be determined. This can happen when a measure formula refers to a column that contains many values without specifying an aggregation such as min, max, count, or sum to get a single result."

Do you have any thoughts about this?

Thank you.

/Peps

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous - The error you are getting seems to indicate that you need to wrap any column references you have in the formula with an aggregation like MAX, MIN, etc.

[Anonymous]

@Greg_Deckler Thanks for your reply. 

I've been looking in to that, and I don't think that it's about MIN, MAX stuff, but rather that my time-dimension is a bit wrong. We don't have any real dates, just a month-date like 2020-09-01 and that's september. And the next month-date is 2020-10-01, so there is no real regularity to our dates.

Or mayby that the formula needs a more specific date or something? Do you have any thoughts about that?

I'm sorry for the lack of information, but as I said from the beginning, I'm a newbie at DAX (don't really get it, it's a **bleep**ty kind of language....) and I'm not great at Excel for that matter so I have a bit of trouble understanding how it works.

But thank you for taking the time mate!

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous The error you are getting indicates that a table of values is being returned when it expects a scalar. This means you are missing an aggregation somewhere. Easiest way to get around that many times is just wrap you column reference in an aggregation like MAX.

[Anonymous]

Have been trying some options, and I thank you for you input. @amitchandak I gave it shot, but it didn't really work. How ever, this seemed to work: 

LastPeriodPreviousYear:= Date(year(MAX(Period[Month_Date]),0)-1,12,31) 

Thank you so much for your input @Greg_Deckler  and @amitchandak