Almost Everything you need to know about Dates in Power BI

Photo by Iga Palacz on Unsplash

Once upon a time, there was Power BI, with it came the struggle with date calculations.

While the struggle with date in Power BI comes in all shapes and forms. This article covers the following common solutions:

• understand Auto Datetime in Power BI
• create a customised calendar table in DAX
• easiest way to order month in a chart
• calculate Year/Quarter/Month To Date
• financial year YTD
• calculate Previous Periods
• week by week calculation

Data and Tool Downloads

Before we start, you may download the starting point .pbix file here to follow alone. There is also references of Tabular Editor. TE is the best free external tool for Power BI which can be downloaded from here.

Again, if you like this article, you might also be interested in my Power Platform book where there are much more similar practical examples.

Data Preparation

Original data come from Microsoft WorldWideImporter data. Power BI link to database with direct import method from localhost\SQLExpress.