Power BI Blog: New INFO Functions

Welcome back to our Power BI blogs.  This time, we look at (yet) another blast of INFO functions.

There are even more INFO functions available now.  All the INFO functions are DAX function versions of existing Analysis Services Dynamic Management Views (DMVs), so that documentation is provided here for additional information.

All INFO functions may now take optional input parameters.  As DMVs these optional input parameters are called restrictions.  For all the INFO functions, this includes their columns, but some have additional restrictions.  INFO.CALCDEPENCY can specify QUERY as one if it’s restrictions or optional input parameters, allowing you to analyse the items in the semantic model needed for that DAX query.  This is helpful when analysing what is being used by the semantic model in a DAX query from a visual in a report.

For example, these are valid uses of INFO functions with and without the input parameters:

Additionally, a bug with the copy functionality of the results grid has been fixed.  Previously, if the results included a blank cell the copy did not work.  Now, copy works with blank cells, and Microsoft has included a right-click copy as well as the option to choose if you want to copy the entire table or just the selected cells from the copy button.

Copy -> Entire table will include the headers.  Copy -> Selected cells by selecting all the cells, including if you click the table icon in the top left of the results, will not include the headers.

That’s it for this week.  Please stay tuned and don’t miss out on more thoughts and insights from http://www.sumproduct.com.