Convenience Filters In SSAS Tabular Models
Think back to the year 2012 when Microsoft introduced us to SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular models. It was new and exciting. The Excel gurus who had been using PowerPivot since 2010 were sneering at us like we were crazy. We could now build a model, publish it to SSAS and have a secure, centralized and highly optimized server solution for the Enterprise that didn’t require us to learn that nasty language called MDX (multidimensional expressions). Although DAX was still new, it made some sense to most Excel users and was much more usable by us “normal” people.
Before Power BI Desktop was available, we would point our Excel reports to this new and exciting SSAS Tabular option, and we had a high-performance ad hoc query capability. We built dashboards in Excel and published them to SharePoint, and we were in a happy place.