How to Create a Measure Table in Power BI – Best Practices for Clean & Organized Reports

[anmolmalviya05]

In today’s blog, we’ll discuss a highly recommended best practice in Power BI: creating a dedicated Measure Table. This becomes especially important as your report complexity grows and the number of measures increases.

❓ Why Create a Measure Table?

When working on real-world projects, it's common to create multiple measures across various tables. For example:

• A few measures might be in the Customer table
• Others in Sales, Exchange Rate, or other tables

This scattered placement leads to confusion – both for you and your teammates. If someone else opens your report later, understanding where each measure lives and what it does becomes unnecessarily difficult.

👉 Solution? Centralize all your measures in a dedicated measure table. It’s cleaner, easier to manage, and a Power BI best practice.

🛠️ Steps to Create a Measure Table

🔹 Step 1: Create an Empty Table
Go to the Home tab in Power BI Desktop.
Click on Enter Data.
In the dialog box:Click Load.
Power BI will now create a new table with one default column. Don’t worry — we’ll remove that shortly.

🔹 Step 2: Move Existing Measures into the New Table
Let’s say you already have a few measures like Demo 1, Demo 2, Demo 3, etc., located across different tables.

Option 1: Manual Move via Table View
Go to each measure.
In the Measure Tools ribbon, update the Home Table to Measure Table.
Repeat for each measure.

Option 2: Move in Bulk via Model View (Recommended)
Switch to Model View in Power BI.
Select all your measures using Ctrl + Click.
In the Properties pane, find Home Table and set it to Measure Table.
✅ This moves all selected measures at once – fast and efficient!

🧹 Step 3: Clean UpOnce all measures are moved:

Delete the default column (e.g., Column1) from the new Measure Table.
Power BI will now treat this table as a pure measure container, and it will appear at the top of your Fields pane. A neat, clean workspace!

Checkout Step by Step Tutorial for the same: https://youtu.be/LkOPFF4N9RY?feature=shared

🎯 What’s Next?
In the next blog, we’ll cover how to organize your measures into folders inside the Measure Table – perfect when you have 50+ measures across categories like Sales, Profit, Discounts, Time Intelligence, etc.

📢 Final Thoughts
Creating a measure table:

Simplifies navigation in large reports
Improves collaboration with other developers
Enhances performance by reducing confusion and dependency

Regards

Anmol Malviya

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[Chris_Greer]

I have heard this approach recommended for a while and agree that it can make things easier for the developer. However, I question whether it makes the most logical sense from the perspective of consumers and self-service report developers using the model who do not maintain it. I would love to hear others' thoughts on this.

[Olayemi_Awofe]

Thank you for this.

[local5784]

@Chris_Greer  We have a measures table and self-service users.  What we did was we created folders in the measure table to organize the measures in such a way that self-service users and others maintaining the model could easily distinguish which measures to use in their reports versus picking any column/measure they wanted.  

Then with the self-service users, as a part of our governance documentation, we define which measure folder they should be using in a meeting so we're all on the same page.