How to Create a Measures Table (Placeholder for Measures) in Power BI

Creating a measures table in your Power BI data model is one of the most common questions we get from folks wondering how they can better organize the measures they create. 

When navigating through your data model in Power BI Desktop, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of tables and fields, especially if you have a data model with several tables and a multitude of measures. 

In this blog, we’ll cover how to create a Measures Table in Power BI by using some fairly straightforward techniques.

What’s a Measures Table From Power BI?

A measures table is essentially just a placeholder table that acts as a folder for your measures. It doesn’t contain any actual data, rather acting as a folder for our measures.

How to Create a Measures Table

In the Home tab of the Desktop ribbon, click Enter Data. This will pop up a screen that allows you to manually enter data.  You can actually paste in data that you copied from Excel to this screen, but we’re not going to use that functionality right now.

For now we are going to rename the column to Measures and then rename the table name at the bottom to Measure Table. See the screenshot below.

Create Calculation

Now you have a new table with one blank measure in it named Measures. Right-click in your new table and click New measure. Enter in the calculation that you want to add to your report. 

All measures that you create under this Measure Table can reference other tables in your data model. Since measures aren’t actually adding data to your model, only the measure itself lives here allowing you to separate out your measures from your other tables.

Clean Up & Uses

The last thing you will want to do is delete the original field that you created while making the table. In this case, we named the column Measures, so go ahead and delete that Measures column from the Measure Table. 

As you can see below, now you have a table specifically for storing your measures separate from the other tables in your data model. 

Although this is something we practice, it’s easy to understand why some people wouldn’t want to do this. We do it because it adds simplicity to our interactions with Power BI Desktop. This way, you don’t have to scroll through seven tables and hundreds of columns to find measures. While we could easily use the Search field, this approach makes our model more organized. 

On the flip side, we understand how people would like the measures to be in the tables that they refer to. This would help people understand what tables measures were referring to without looking through the DAX.

Ref: https://www.tessellationtech.io/creating-a-measures-table-in-power-bi/