simple count by year

Hi SeattleCrime ,

Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about a date tble just yet. You will need one when you want to get into more advanced time-intelligence functions but, for now, you'll probably get along better trying the following:

1) In Power Query Editor highlight your [offence_start_datetime] column and use this button on the ribbon to get a new column that is just the date:

This new date column is what you will use as your visual axes. As it's unlikely that many datetime values will align with others in terms of counts, this way you will be agreggating counts over entire days, so you should get more rewarding outputs.

2) You can set any fields that you drag and drop into your visuals to count if you want the easiest/quickest ouput. Just drag the fields to your visual then, on the right in the 'Values' area, right-click on the field you want to count and select the count option:

When you start getting a bit more comfortable, the correct way to implement this would be using measures similar to this:

_noofItems = COUNT(yourTable[FieldName])

//or

_noofUniqueItems = DISTINCTCOUNT(yourTable[FieldName])

Hopefully the above should get you started very quickly doing what you want to do then, once your knowledge grows, you can start relating date tables and creating more complex time-intelligence functions.

Pete