My first visual calculation
- By Marc Lelijveld, Madzy Stikkelorum, Jeroen ter Heerdt
- 2/25/2026
In summary
Chapter 1 explained why visual calculations were created: to enable every end user to get more out of Power BI without having to master DAX. The purpose of this chapter was to demonstrate this using a few basic examples.
This chapter showed you how easy it is to create visual calculations for existing visuals in a Power BI report, without the need to write complex DAX measures. If you are familiar with Excel formulas, adding visual calculations to your Power BI model should be easy. Alternatively, you can use one of several expression templates to create quite complex calculations with just a few clicks.
The learning curve for visual calculations is short, enabling every business user to create quick insights based on the existing reports and enhanced with visual calculations. Moreover, because the outcome of the new visual calculation appears in the visual calculation edit mode window’s visual preview and in the visual itself, you’re not left to sift through a big table of data to glean these insights. Rather, you can visualize them directly in your report. You can even create complex calculations with multiple steps and hide intermediate results. In this way you can more easily follow exactly what is being calculated in the visual calculation edit mode window but display only the final result on the report page.
Visual calculations also offer a performance improvement compared to measures because visual calculations work only on the data available in the visual matrix (which is usually a small set). Chapter 9, “Breaking down visual calculations execution,” explains this in more detail.
We hope you have grasped some of the possibilities that arise with visual calculations. The rest of this book dives deeper into these possibilities, as well as important concepts that pertain to visual calculations (Chapter 3), functions used for visual calculations (Part II), and how visual calculations compare to other calculation options within Power BI (Chapter 8, “Comparing calculation options”).