Buid your Fisrt card Visual: A Beginner’s Guide 

Hello everyone, welcome back! In this second blog post, I am going to introduce you to the DAX calculations and how you can build a card visual using them, this guide will help you understand the basics of DAX and how it powers insightful data visualizations. Let's get started.

What is DAX in Power BI?

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) is a formula expression language used in Analysis Services, Power BI, and Power Pivot in Excel.It is designed for data analysis and reporting, allowing users to perform complex calculations, create measures, and manipulate data efficiently.

Features of DAX
-Calculated Columns: Add new columns to a table based on expressions.

-Measures:  Perform aggregations dynamically (e.g., sum, average, rank).

-Filtering and Context Manipulation:  Modify how calculations behave based on row or filter context.

-Time Intelligence Functions: Analyze trends over time (e.g., YTD, MTD, previous year comparisons,DATEADD).

DAX is essential for data modeling, custom reporting, and advanced analytics in Power BI . So let's create your first DAX calculation.

Tutorial : Buid your first card visual
First, you’ll need to import a dataset. Since this is your first development in Power BI Desktop, you can easily generate a simple dataset using ChatGPT to save time on data cleaning and transformations. 

Once you've imported the dataset, make sure to verify the data types detected by Power BI. If any data type is incorrect, you can adjust it in Power Query before proceeding. This step is crucial for ensuring accurate calculations and visualizations.  If you would need some guidance on that follow this link.

I have imported a dataset contains few cloumns, namely OrderID, CustomerID, OrderDate, Quantity, SalesAmount. Now the fun part begins. We are going create your first DAX calculation. It is very simple. Click on new measure on your Home tab. Let’s start with a simple measure. Put the following code. 

yay, Now you have sucessfully created your first DAX measure. This measure returns total number of Sales for the XYS company data. Now bring a card visual from the visualization pane and put that measure fiealds section. Feel free to explore and customize—adjust the size, change colors, and apply formatting to make it visually appealing. Power BI is all about making data both insightful and beautiful! Refer the below image. Note: Very simple measures like Sum, Count etc you don't actually need to create a measure manually,Instead, you can simply drag and drop the desired column into the Fields pane and change the aggregation type as needed. This makes quick calculations even easier! 

Alright, you've successfully created your first card visual—great job! But hey, this is 2025, and a plain card visual just won’t cut it if you want your report or dashboard to stand out.

Now, let me show you something way cooler that will take your visuals to the next level!

Very nice and clean right?. For this I have used new card visual in Power BI. I followed this YouTube video by a great PBI content creator. Do check it out. 

And that brings us to the end of this blog! I hope you now have a clear idea of how to build your first Power BI card visual.

The same approach can be applied to create other Power BI visuals, so don’t be afraid to experiment and explore. Remember, practice makes perfect—and that applies to Power BI too! 

Check my next blog, where we’ll dive into Conditional Formatting in Power BI. Happy learning and happy visualizing!