I’m always keep an eye open for potential new members of the Barcelona Power BI User Group. When I see a potential candidate I try to connect and get to know him/her. Today I was surprised that one of these unsuspected new members told me he was already using my script for Time Intelligence (yay!) and followed with a question on calc groups (double yay!). He was trying to build a KPI card which used a measure as the main KPI and wanted to use the previous year value as target, and was struggling to apply the calculation group just to the target one. I gave it some thought and I think the final set up might be useful to more people, so here I come.
Ok, by now you probably know I’m a liiiiitle too much into calculation groups. Once you try calculation groups there’s no going back. Particularly if you do time intelligence analysis (that is comparing values with the previous year, but many other things as well). The reason is that normally you would create a new measure for each pair of calculation – measure, (e.g. Sales Amout PY, Sales Amount YTD, Total Cost PY, Total Cost YTD … ). With calculation groups you just create the box that shifts a measure into producing the time calculation that you want.