Working With Multiple Windows in Tabular Editor 3

If you have started using Tabular Editor 3, and I highly recommend you do if you do any serious development work with Power BI/Tabular models, you should spend some time working with the tabs and making the most of the screen real estate.

This doesn’t really deserve a full blog post, but the animated GIF I created to demonstrate what I am talking about is too big for Twitter, so here is a small post explaining it.

Below there are 3 tabs: Expression Editor, a DAX Query, and a Diagram. I was working on a laptop where screen real estate was precious so wanted to toggle between the diagram and the DAX query using the Windows ALT-TAB shortcut.

Simply drag the Diagram tab out until it is free floating. Now it is part of the Windows ALT-TAB process. When done, drag it back into Tabular Editor until it is in the middle of that tiny control the red arrow is pointing to.

Of course, if you have multiple monitors or one of those crazy 49” monitors, you could drag tabs out to different areas to look at at the same time.

Quickly Format All DAX Code in Tabular Editor

If you aren’t using Tabular Editor to format all of your DAX code for you, you are missing out. I’ve written a super short script that will format all of your DAX code in measures, and make it look picture perfect in Power BI Desktop.

First, you need to download Tabular Editor. The free version is here. There is a commercial version, which I highly recommend, available here. If you don’t have Tabular Editor yet, start with the free version for now. This is the code you need:

/*  Cycle over all measures in model format using
    DAX Formatter with Short Lines, then add 1 line
    feed to the start of the measure */

FormatDax(Model.AllMeasures, true);
foreach (var m in Model.AllMeasures)
    {
        m.Expression = '\n' + m.Expression;
    }

In Tabular Editor 2.x, paste that code in the advanced scripting window as shown. Tabular Editor 3 users just click on the New Script button on the ribbon and paste the code there. For both, press the green Run button.

This will do 2 things.

The FormatDax() function will take all of your DAX code for measures only, and send it to DAXFormatter.com for formatting, then get the results. It does this in one big batch to lessen the load on the DAX Formatter servers, vs hitting it 100 times if you have 100 measures. The ‘true’ parameter will use the Short line format. If you like long lines, just get rid of the “, true” part. But really, who likes long lines? 😉 In both versions it will tell you how many changes were made to the model in the status bar at the bottom.

The ‘foreach’ loop will then go through all of the measures and add a line feed. An example of the result as seen in Power BI Desktop is below.

Without the line feed added, it will start the measure on the top row, and it looks like this:

It still works, it just doesn’t look as nice. The line feed forces the measure to start on the row under the measure name.

Now you need to save these changes back to Power BI Desktop, or in the case of TE/3, to a dataset via an XMLA endpoint in a premium workspace, or SSAS/AAS models depending on your license. Just click the icon that has the floppy disk on top of a cube. (It is 2021. Will we ever get rid of the floppy disk icon for save operations?)

To save this script in Tabular Editor 2, either keep a copy of the text somewhere like Evernote or OneNote, or save it to a file. Tabular Editor 3 users can save it as a macro so it is always available to you. This is one of the productivity enhancements of TE/3.

You’ll notice I said it does this for measures. It will not format DAX in Calculated Columns nor in Calculated Tables. That is currently a limitation of what parts of the model Tabular Editor is able to change.

Now you have no excuse for having poorly formatted measures.

This is just one of the many features of Tabular Editor, but it makes it worth getting even if you are new to Power BI. Formatted DAX code is so much easier to read, understand, and edit, and now it is a simple button press away.