New to Power Bi and Paginated Reports

[Akircher]

Hello I am new to Power Bi and Paginated reports. I mostly use excel and python pandas for data anlysis.  At my job I have been asked to make a paginated report off a shared report.  When I open the report in Power Bi desktop the only side tab that I have is the report tab and do not have access to the data or model tab (the only reason I am menting this is because I am not sure if it is relevant). 

I noticed that some of the data I need to work with is stored as an implicit measure in Power BI Desktop and when I open it in Paginated reports it changes it to a table instead of a measure. I found out that I am suppose to convert this to an explict meausre for it to appear in measures. However, I also found out you can use Desktop Performance Anlyzer and copy the DAX into the query designer.  

I am trying to figure out why I can post the DAX that works with implicit measures and the table will produce results but when I try to put the implict measure (now a table object) into the report table builder as a value it does not.  Why can the DAX work with implict values in Report builder while the query designer struggles? I guess I feel lost because I am realitively new to this. 

[d_gosbell · Accepted solution]

I'm not really sure I'm understanding what you are doing so maybe it will help if we define some terms. 

Power BI Desktop will create an implicit measure when you drag a column onto a visual in a location that requires an aggregate value. For example if you drag a "Product Category" and a "Sales Amount" column onto a visual Power BI Desktop will usually create an implied measure over the numeric "Sales Amount" column. This will typically be a small part of the query that you copy from Performance Analyzer. So if your table is called "Sales", the default implied measure would be:

SUM( Sales[Sales Amount] )

You could right-click on your table in Power BI Desktop and create an explicit measure called "Total Sales" by adding the following expression:

Total Sales = SUM( Sales[Sales Amount] )

If you do this you will now have an explicit measure which you can reference in both Power BI Desktop and in Report Builder. Most implied measures just do a simple aggregation over a single column like SUM / AVERAGE / MIN / MAX / COUNT / etc.

If you copy a query out of the Performance Analyzer pane what you will get is not just the implicit measure but a complete query that returns a resultset that can be many rows (maybe this is why you are talking about the measure turning into a table?). A DAX query which returns a tabular resultset will contain the EVALUATE keyword, you cannot use this keyword within a measure.