Forum Discussion
Creating Date Tables
- 7 years ago
IMHO, the fastest way is:
- Open a blank query in Power Query of Power BI
- type ={Number.From(#date(2018,1,1))..Number.From(#date(2018,12,31))}
- That will generate a series of numbers as a list
- Convert it to a table (upper left menu button.
- Convert the ABC123 type to date
- Rename to Date.
- Now you have a date table. Add columns as necessary (year, month, month name, etc) to make your date table suit your needs.
- Close and load.
- Right-click on it and mark it as a date table.
If you have source data with dates in it, get fancy and find the earliest date in your data, then make row #2 above be Jan 1, YYYY where YYYY is the earliest date in your dataset,
- 5 years ago
So if your original line is like this, you just need to use some functions to determine the dates vs hardcoding.
={Number.From(#date(2018,1,1))..Number.From(#date(2018,12,31))}This will always give you a rolling 6 months. I've inserted a lot of line feeds to make the formulas a bit easier to read, but you could type that Source line all on one line. The key to all of this is DateTime.LocalNow() - that is equivalent to @NOW() in Excel - the current date and time from the system clock.
let Source = { Number.From( Date.AddMonths( DateTime.Date( DateTime.LocalNow() ), -6 ) ).. Number.From( DateTime.Date( DateTime.LocalNow() ) ) }, #"Converted to Table" = Table.FromList(Source, Splitter.SplitByNothing(), null, null, ExtraValues.Error), #"Changed Type" = Table.TransformColumnTypes(#"Converted to Table",{{"Column1", type date}}) in #"Changed Type"
Here's a link to an edX class I took about a year ago. This video shows adding date tables directly within PowerPivot in Excel 2016.
If the link doesn't work (or if you don't have a login for edX), in the PowerPivot window, go to the Design ribbon, and there is an option under the Calendars section for new date table.
Ahhh... interesting. I've never tried that as I always have a date table from Power Query. That is just a macro with a few pre-defined calculated columns. Could be handy, but depending on the size of your model, a DAX based table will slow the model down and bloat the file up.
But no, Power BI doesn't have that feature.