A fascinating insight into how Power BI works, but is this any practical use to us? Let me be clear: I don’t think you should be using any of these functions yourself in a real-world report. I’m sure all this would be documented and publicised if Microsoft did want us to use it ourselves! Another consideration is that these new functions return tables and that makes them awkward to use in regular .pbix Power BI reports – I guess we could create calculated tables although that’s not as flexible as returning a table from a query as shown above. That said, even though we can’t write our own DAX queries in regular Power BI reports, we can write our own DAX queries in Paginated Reports and we can now create Paginated Reports that use a Power BI dataset as a data source. I tested putting one of the queries generated by the Key Influencers visual into a Paginated Report connected to the same dataset and it worked ok (even after publishing). You can also embed DAX queries connected to a published dataset in Excel too, as I show here. Hmm, plenty to think about then…
Chalk this up as “fun to know but not recommended to use yourself.”