Beginner YTD

[bhartsell]

Hello, 

I've been using the cloud-based Power BI for several months, but I am moving to Desktop Power BI because I was told it could allow me to do some specific things I couldn't do online. I just started using it, with the data being from an excel document. 

I'm trying to get two pie charts, one with money raised YTD by source, and the other MTD by source. How do I do this? I've seen people talking about timestamps and measures but I'm not sure what those mean. 

Thank you!

[Eric_Zhang]

@bhartsell

How is it going with the above advice? For further questions, feel free to post.

[bhartsell]

I figured it out, this was all very helpful. I made a Time Intelligence and made the measure "Sum YTD."

[kcantor]

@bhartsell Here is a link with more information on YTD.

http://databear.com/2016/05/08/power-bi-tips-calculating-year-to-date-values/

I do agree with @Anonymous regarding Rob and Avi's book. They explian DAX in easy to understand language. I will alsos econd the need for a date dimension table. It is necessary for DAX to create time intelligence functions such as YTD and MTD calculations as well as Last year calculations from the same data table.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Power in Power BI 🙂

Measures are like little formulas you right.   Say  "Total Sales := SUM(Sales[Amount])"   they generally operate on a full set of rows, and return a single value.   (Add up ALL my sales... returning just the total).  The cool think is that they are super dynamic.  If you happen to split your data out by geography, you don't have to go write a Total Sales By Geography measure... your current Total Sales measure will "just work".

I'd probably recommend you grab a book.  Rob Collie and Avi Singh... or Matt Allington's... both are great and will get your ramped up quickly.

In your case, because you want to do some stuff based around "time intelligence" that will be of particular importance in your reading.  You will want a separate "calendar table" and create a "relationship" between these tables... and it will change your life.