Telling Power BI Desktop which table acts as the calendar, by choosing a date column with no gaps, blanks or duplicates. Classic time intelligence depends on this whenever relationships join on something other than a date, and doing it drops the automatic date/time tables.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Mark as date table in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Power BI Desktop
A free Windows program where authors connect to sources, shape and model data, and design reports before publishing them to the Power BI service. Dashboards are not made here.
- Event
Table in Log Analytics where entries from Windows event logs are kept.
- CALENDAR
Generates a date table as a calculated table: given a start and end date, this DAX function returns a single column, called Date, listing every day in between, including both ends.
- Classic time intelligence
The original DAX time functions, like TOTALYTD, which work from the date column of a table marked as a date table. They expect a Gregorian (or shifted Gregorian) calendar with no gaps in the dates and offer no week-level functions, which sets them apart from the calendar-based preview approach.
- JOIN
Combines rows from two or more tables in one SELECT, most often by pairing a primary key with the foreign key that refers to it.