Forum Discussion
Help with FILTER: "multiple columns" error
You can use this formula.
YEAR 2014 = IF('table'[year]=2014,2014)
Thank you, that of course makes sense...
The reason I'm trying to apply this measure is actually to simplify other measures by using this new measure (the filter on year...) as a nested measure to other measure.
This it how I'm trying to make things work. I have a model where a period table (seen in the screenshot) acts as the lookup table to be able to filter data tables with differing granularity (sales table - high ganurality with transcations on a single date level- and a budget and monthly estimates - with a lower granularity ie month level).
Using this period table (YearMonth), I have succeded in writing mesures to filter results based on current month, YTD, same month last year, or YTD previous year. One example of these period measures is:
Previous YTD Sales = CALCULATE([Sales];
filter(YearMonth;
YearMonth[Year]=YEAR(TODAY())-1
&&
YearMonth[month]<=MONTH(TODAY())))This apears to be working - please bear with me because this is my first attempt at Power BI hving read two books and done the "preiliminary" Youtube video watching...
In order to make things simpler, what I'm now trying to do is to fold the Year and month references into simpler measure to nest them in all further measure involving other calculations In other words to avoid having to type in the whole filter expression used in the "Previous YTD Sales" example every time I need to write a new measure... So Ideally I am trying to write a measure which equates to:
Current Year defined as YearMonth[Year] = YEAR(TODAY())
and
Current Month defined as YearMonth[month]=MONTH(TODAY())
plus the different options for previous year etc...
So the first thing I tried was to create a measure by filtering the YearMonth table. This satrted off as
Current Month = FILTER(YearMonth; YearMonth[month] = MONTH(TODAY()))....
But was getting the error mentioned in my original post...
I guess I can always just past the expression into a notepad and copy and paste when needed, but if there is a simpler way....
Many thanks again for your help!
Paul.
Ah, I see what you're going for. Since you can make base measures that can be referenced and filtered in other measures, you want to be able to have a premade filter declaration that you could plug in the same way. Unfortunately that's not possible. Measures aggregate to a single scalar value. What you're proposing would have to return a table, so measure-like filter declarations would have to be a completely different type of data from measures, and that currently doesn't exist.
The closest we have is the New Table button, which allows you to define naked tables in DAX. The formulas look like what you've written. You can't really use them in the plug-and-play method you're imagining though, and the tables exist in memory even if there's no other measure referencing them at the time, so it's not really a substitute for what you want.
I actually proposed the same idea to some developers at the Data Insights Summit last year. I might submit it to the idea forum to see what the community thinks.
Note, that for the example you provided, you could just add a column called PreviousYTD defined as:
PreviousYTD= YearMonth[Year]=YEAR(TODAY())-1 && YearMonth[month]<=MONTH(TODAY())
This is just a regular boolean expression, you could use as:
Previous YTD Sales = CALCULATE([Sales]; YearMonth[PreviousYTD] )
This would work, since in your case the definition of the previous year is not dynamic (at least not depending on the user's selection).
(Usually, when people talk about about Previous year calculations, it means "one year before the currently selected date").
