Leveraging Calculation Groups

When working with date intelligence, it’s common to have many quasi-redundant measures that calculate various different metrics for YTD, MTD, PY, PYTD, PMTD, and other common date intelligence intervals. For example, business users may be interested in a year-to-date, year-over-year, and year-over-year percentage calculation for gross sales, net sales, and tax amount. Without the use of calculation groups, this would require nine DAX measures to calculate these three measures at each of the three date intelligence intervals.

Calculation groups can greatly assist in reducing the number of measures required by allowing a DAX expression to be reused for any measure. In the example given, this means that three DAX expressions could serve the needs of the nine DAX expressions required without the use of calculation groups.

This recipe demonstrates the use of calculation groups in the context of date intelligence in order to eliminate redundant...