By Nick Edwards

In this blog post we’ll take a quick look at creating a self-generating calendar table using DAX.

Dates are important if we want to perform time intelligence reporting on our data i.e. yearly sales, monthly sales, weekly sales, year to date sales or previous year sales.

We’ll be using the calendar function to create our date table, but there are other methods to do this such as CALENDARAUTO or GENERATESERIES.

Here is the syntax we’ll be using to generate our date table.

CALENDAR(<start_date>,<end_date>)

The calendar function returns a single column called “Date” which generates a continuous series of dates from the specified start date to the specified end date. So if we specified the start date to be the 01/01/2020 and the end date to be 31/12/2020 the function would generate 366 rows of distinct date data.

We can then use the add columns function to expand our calendar table further to add specific columns we wish to slice our data by i.e. year, month, quarter, week number, day…

Here is the syntax we will be using to expand our calender table.

ADDCOLUMNS(<table>,<name>,<expression>,[<name>,<expression>]…)

Let’s use an example to further explore how these functions work in practice using some sample adventure works sales data. Here we use the “Get Data” icon to directly query our adventure works database and bring over a sample of sales data, named “AW_Sales”.

Now, to create our calendar table we need to click “New Table” in the modeling tab and enter the following function.

Note: I like to use variables in my date table just to keep the DAX looking clean and fuss free, but this isn’t necessary.

For the start date parameter we have used the FIRSTDATE() and for the end Date parameter we have used the LASTDATE() function. This is so we can extract the first and last “OrderDate” from our AW_Sales table. We could have also used the MIN() and MAX() function to deliver the same results using the newly created “Date” column. As we can see this has generated a sequential date list from the 01/01/2012 to the 31/12/2013 with 731 distinct rows of data.

Now we want to expand our calendar table using the newly created “Date” column with new columns which can slice and dice our data. To do this I use the ADDCOLUMNS function. Here I have added Year, Quarter, Year Month, Month Number, Month Name, Day Of Year, Day Of Month, Day Of Week and Day Name as columns.

Once we’ve done this, we will mark our newly created table as a date table to allow Power BI to recognize date hierarchies and time intelligence functions.

We can now view our newly generated calender table in the data view. Instantly when any new data enters our model from “AW_Sales”, the calendar table will expand accordingly due to the last date function used above.

Now it’s just a case of creating a one to many relationship between our new calendar table and our “AW_Sales” table. We’ll create a one to many relationship between “Calendar[Date]” and “AW_Sales[OrderDate]” as shown below.

Congratulations we have now created a fully fledged calendar table that can slice and dice our “AW_Sales” tale by any of the columns we have created in our calendar table, as shown in the example below.