How to Create a Measures Table in Power BI

Building dashboards in Power BI can feel exciting, but as your reports get more complex, your field list can become a mess of scattered calculations. Using a measures table cleans all that up, giving every calculation a dedicated, organized home. This tutorial will show you exactly how to create and manage a measures table to make your Power BI models cleaner, more scalable, and much easier to navigate.

What is a Measures Table and Why Do You Absolutely Need One?

In Power BI, a "measures table" (sometimes called a measure group) isn't technically a table that holds data. Instead, it's an empty table that acts as a simple container or folder to organize all of your DAX measures in one place.

If you don’t use one, your DAX measures - like Total Sales, Year-over-Year Growth, or Average Order Value - end up stuck inside the data tables they reference. Your Total Sales measure might live in your 'Sales' table, while a Count of Ad Clicks measure might be in your 'Facebook Ads' table. After you create a dozen or more measures, finding the one you need becomes a frustrating game of hide-and-seek.

Here’s why centralizing them in a dedicated measures table is a non-negotiable best practice:

• Better Organization: All your calculations live in one spot. No more hunting through different tables to find that one specific measure you wrote last month.
• Improved Usability: When you or a colleague opens the report, it's immediately clear where to find all the key business calculations. This makes collaboration and hand-offs infinitely smoother.
• A Cleaner Data Model: It separates your raw data tables (like 'Sales', 'Customers', 'Calendar') from your business logic (your DAX measures). This mental separation helps you think about your model more clearly.
• Scalability: As your report grows from 10 measures to 100, having them organized in a single table (with folders, which we’ll cover later) is the only way to stay sane.

Simply put, it’s a small organizational trick that has a huge impact on your efficiency and the professionalism of your Power BI reports.

How to Create a Measures Table: The Easiest Method

The most common and straightforward way to create a measures table is by using the "Enter Data" feature. This lets you create a new table manually without needing any data source.

Step 1: Use "Enter Data" to Create a Blank Table

Your first step is to create a new, empty table that will serve as the home for your measures.

• Navigate to the Home ribbon at the top of the Power BI interface.
• Look for the "Data" group and click the Enter Data button.
• A "Create Table" window will pop up. You’ll see a single blank column named "Column1". You don’t need to add any data here.

Step 2: Name Your Table

In the "Name" box at the bottom of the "Create Table" window, give your table a name. A common convention is to name it "_Measures" or "Key Metrics".

Pro Tip: Starting the name with an underscore (_) is a clever trick that forces Power BI to keep this table at the very top of your fields list in alphabetical order, making it incredibly easy to find every time.

Once named, click Load. Your new, empty table will now appear in the Fields pane on the right side of your screen.

Step 3: Hide the Unnecessary Column

Because you used the "Enter Data" method, your new measures table has a blank column called "Column1" in it. This column serves no purpose and should be hidden to keep your report clean.

• Find your new _Measures table in the Fields pane.
• Right-click on Column1.
• Select Hide from the context menu.

Hiding this column is the final step in turning this regular table into a proper measures table. Once you add your first measure, Power BI will recognize that this table only contains calculations and will change its icon, which we'll see next.

Adding Your First Measure to the New Table

Now that your container is ready, it's time to give it some measures. Let's create a very simple "Total Sales" measure and ensure it lives in your new _Measures table.

• Right-click on the _Measures table in the Fields pane.
• Select New measure from the menu.
• The DAX formula bar will appear at the top. Enter your calculation. For this example, let's assume you have a 'SalesData' table with a 'Revenue' column:

Total Sales = SUM(SalesData[Revenue])

Once you hit Enter, your new "Total Sales" measure will appear under the _Measures table, nested below the hidden "Column1".

The Magic Icon Change

Notice something cool? After you hid "Column1" and added your first measure, Power BI automatically changed the icon for the _Measures table from a standard table icon (a grid) to a calculator icon. This is Power BI's visual cue that you’ve successfully created a measure group. It's now officially a home for calculations only.

Moving Existing Measures Into Your Measures Table

What if you already have a report with five, ten, or even fifty measures scattered across different data tables? No problem. It's incredibly easy to move them all to their new, organized home.

Step 1: Select the Measure to Move

Find a measure in your Fields pane that isn't in your measures table. For example, you might have an "Average Session Duration" measure located in your "Google Analytics" table. Click on it to select it.

Step 2: Change the Home Table

With the measure selected, a new contextual ribbon called Measure tools will appear at the top of Power BI.

• In the "Measure tools" ribbon, find the Home Table dropdown menu.
• Click the dropdown and select your _Measures table from the list.

That's it! The measure will instantly vanish from its old location and reappear in your _Measures table.

Moving Measures in Bulk

If you have many measures to move, doing them one by one would be tedious. Luckily, you can move them in bulk from the Model view.

• Click on the Model view icon on the left-hand side of Power BI.
• In the Fields pane on the right, hold down the Ctrl key and click to select all the measures you want to move.
• With all of them selected, look at the Properties pane below the Fields pane.
• Find the Home Table dropdown and select your _Measures table.

All your selected measures will move at once, saving you a huge amount of time.

Advanced Organization: Using Display Folders

For large reports, simply having all your measures in one list isn't enough. Imagine having 50+ measures. The list would still be too long to scroll through. This is where Display Folders come in.

You can create subfolders inside your measures table to group related calculations. For example, you could create folders for "Sales," "Marketing," "Time Intelligence," and "User Engagement."

How to Create a Display Folder

• Go to the Model view.
• In the Fields pane, select one or more measures that you want to place into a folder. You can multi-select by holding Ctrl.
• In the Properties pane, find the text field for Display folder.
• Type the name of the folder you want to create (e.g., "Sales Metrics").
• Press Enter.

When you return to the Report view, you’ll see your measures neatly organized into a collapsible folder. You can even create nested folders by using a backslash, like "Sales Metrics\YTD" to create a "YTD" folder inside "Sales Metrics." This level of organization is the mark of a well-structured, professional Power BI report.

Final Thoughts

Adopting the habit of creating a measures table is one of the simplest yet most impactful changes you can make to your Power BI workflow. It transforms a potentially chaotic model into a clean, searchable, and scalable system that makes development and collaboration immeasurably easier.

At the end of the day, practices like these are about saving time and reducing friction in the reporting process. While Power BI demands a structured approach, we created Graphed to remove these manual steps entirely. Instead of wrestling with DAX or organizing measures, our users simply connect their data from sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, or Salesforce and ask questions in plain English - like "create a dashboard showing ROAS by ad campaign" - and we build the real-time dashboards for them, no modeling required.