How CALCULATE works in DAX

Written by Marco Russo

Sunday, 03 January 2010 14:29

The CALCULATE function in DAX is the magic key for many calculations we can do in DAX. However, it is not pretty intuitive how it works and I spent a lot of time trying to understand how it can be used.

First of all, this is the syntax.

CALCULATE( <expression>, <filter1>, <filter2>… )

The expression that we put in the first parameter has to be evaluated to return the result (that is a value, not a table). For this reason, the expression is usually an aggregation function like SUM, MIN, MAX, COUNTROWS and so on.