Now it’s time to create some Measures in the Tiny IMDB database. A measure is a DAX formula that is used to determine dynamic values in a pivot table. Measures “live” in the Values area of a Pivot Table. They don’t “live” in the table. Measures require a function. With measures, you need some sort of aggregation such as SUM, MIN, MAX, AVERAGE, COUNT, COUNTA, DISTINCTCOUNT or something else.

What might we need? How about the total runtime minutes of all titles? We could create a measure for the average rating. The total number of titles. We might want to know the number of titles in each genre. We could get the average runtime minutes for each genre. How many votes were cast in total? How many votes were cast in each genre? Is there a correlation between the number of votes and the rating given? Is there an overall correlation across all genres or not. What is we broke it down by genre and looked for a correlation? We need measures for all of this.

Create Measures

Let’s create a total minutes measure. In Excel, Power Pivot tab, Measures, New Measure. Assign it to the tbltitles, not tbltitlebasics. tbltitles is our new merged table that we’ll use.