Business Intelligence with Power BI

L05 · DAX I: Measures

Practice — Mild · Solution

Checkpoints, verified

MeasureValue
Total Revenue (SUM or SUMX form)$66,813,563.97
Total Cost$28,099,192.18
Gross Profit$38,714,371.79
Gross Margin %57.94%
Order Count85,538
Average Order Value$781.10

Step 7's margin-by-category table: Decor 63.95% · Kitchen & Dining 61.07% · Lighting 59.41% · Outdoor 57.07% · Furniture 55.56%. The surprise most people feel: Furniture — the revenue leader — sits last in margin, and Decor, dead last in revenue, leads it. Medium digs into exactly this.

Reflection answers

  • The SUMX form, for a long-lived model: no stored column to spend memory on, no intermediate that can silently go stale, one definition holding the whole computation. The column form is legitimate for debugging and teaching — which is why the lesson builds it first — but the measure is the keeper.
  • From the filter context: each table cell filtered the model to its category before the one formula ran. Five contexts, five answers, zero extra formulas — and Lesson 6 hands you the tool (CALCULATE) that edits that context on purpose.