How to Export All Measures from Power BI

Building a robust Power BI report often means creating dozens, if not hundreds, of custom DAX measures. While these calculations are the engine of your analysis, getting them out of your PBIX file for documentation, auditing, or migration can feel unnecessarily complicated. This guide walks you through several practical methods to export all your measures, from simple workarounds to powerful external tools.

Why Export Power BI Measures?

Before diving into the "how," it's helpful to understand the "why." Extracting your measures isn't just a technical exercise, it serves several critical business functions:

• Documentation: Creating a data dictionary or a central repository of business logic. This is essential for onboarding new team members and ensuring everyone interprets metrics the same way.
• Auditing and Debugging: When you have all your measures in a simple text file or spreadsheet, you can quickly scan for inconsistencies, find dependencies, or debug complex calculations far more easily than clicking through them one-by-one in the DAX formula bar.
• Version Control: For more advanced teams, storing measure definitions in a version control system like Git allows you to track changes over time, collaborate on development, and revert to previous versions if needed.
• Migration and Reusability: Perhaps you need to move your business logic to a new Power BI file, an Azure Analysis Services model, or a SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) tabular model. Exporting allows you to do this without manually recreating every single measure.

Method 1: The Quick Caffeinated Copy-Paste (Good for a Few Measures)

Let's start with the most basic method. If you only have a handful of measures (say, fewer than ten), exporting them manually is often the fastest way to get the job done.

This approach is painfully simple but brutally inefficient at scale.

How to do it:

1. Open your Power BI file and navigate to the Report, Data, or Model view.
2. In the Data pane on the right, find the measure you want to copy. Measures are denoted by a calculator icon.
3. Click on the measure. Its DAX formula will appear in the formula bar at the top.
4. Click inside the formula bar, select all the text (Ctrl + A), and copy it (Ctrl + C).
5. Paste the formula into a text editor, Word document, or Excel spreadsheet.
6. Repeat for every measure. Feel your soul leave your body around measure number 12.

Pros: No extra tools or setup required. Fast for trivial tasks. Cons: Extremely time-consuming and error-prone for any reasonably complex model. It's easy to miss a measure or copy the wrong one.

Method 2: Using Performance Analyzer (A Clever Workaround)

If you don't want to install external tools but have too many measures for manual copy-pasting, Power BI's built-in Performance Analyzer offers a clever, if indirect, way to extract them all at once. The trick is to force Power BI to generate a query that includes every measure you want to export.

How to do it:

1. Go to the View tab in the Power BI ribbon and check the box for Performance analyzer. This will open the pane on the right.
2. In the Performance Analyzer pane, click Start recording.
3. On a blank page in your report, add a new Table visual.
4. From the Data pane, drag every single measure you want to export into the "Columns" field of your new table visual. Yes, all of them. Power BI will churn for a bit as it tries to calculate everything.
5. Once the table visual has loaded (or timed out), go back to the Performance Analyzer pane. You'll see an entry for your table visual.
6. Expand the entry for the table visual by clicking the '+' icon. You'll see a section called "DAX query."
7. Click the Copy query link.
8. Paste this text into a text editor like VS Code or Notepad++.

You now have a text block containing the DAX query that Power BI used to populate the table. Scroll through it, and you will find a 'DEFINE' section where every single measure is defined with its full DAX formula.

DEFINE MEASURE 'YourTable'[YourMeasureName] = SUM('YourTable'[SomeColumn]) MEASURE 'AnotherTable'[AnotherMeasure] = CALCULATE(COUNTROWS('Sales'), 'Sales'[Amount] > 1000) ...and so on...

You'll need to clean this up a bit to isolate just the measure definitions, but it saves you from having to copy each one individually.

Pros: Uses a built-in tool. Exports all measures at once. Cons: A bit of a workaround. The output contains extra query code that you need to manually remove.

Method 3: The Gold Standard with DAX Studio (The Best Way)

For anyone serious about Power BI development, DAX Studio is an essential, free tool. It's a powerful client for connecting to your Power BI data model and running queries, analyzing performance, and - most importantly for us - exporting metadata.

Step 1: Connect DAX Studio to your Power BI File

1. If you haven't already, download and install DAX Studio from daxstudio.org.
2. Make sure your Power BI Desktop (PBIX) file is open.
3. Open DAX Studio. The connection dialog will appear.
4. It should automatically detect your open PBIX file under the "PBI / SSDT Model" option. Select it and click Connect.

Step 2: Export Measures Using a DMV Query

DAX Studio allows you to query the "Dynamic Management Views" (DMVs) of your model. Think of these as special tables that contain metadata about your model itself - its tables, columns, relationships, and measures.

1. Once connected, click on the DMV tab in the left-hand pane.
2. Scroll through the list of views and find one named MDSCHEMA_MEASURES.
3. Double-click MDSCHEMA_MEASURES. This will automatically write a query in the main window:

SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.MDSCHEMA_MEASURES

1. Click the Run button in the ribbon (or press F5). Instantly, the Results grid at the bottom will populate with a perfect table of all your measures. This includes columns like 'MEASURE_NAME', 'MEASUREGROUP_NAME' (the table it's in), and 'EXPRESSION' (the full DAX formula). Above the results grid, click the Output button and choose where to send the data. You can choose Grid (the default), File (to save it directly as a CSV or tab-delimited file), or even copy-paste it into Excel.

That's it. In under a minute, you have a perfectly formatted, clean export of every single measure in your model.

Quick tip: Tabular Editor is another amazing external tool that can also export measures and provides a more holistic model management experience. If you already use it, you can script out the measures easily from the Advanced Scripting editor.

Pros: The fastest, cleanest, and most scalable method. Provides rich metadata beyond just the formula. Cons: Requires installing a free third-party tool.

Method 4: For the Automation Experts (Using PowerShell)

For those who love to script and automate everything, you can connect directly to the Analysis Services engine running behind your Power BI Desktop file and extract the measures using PowerShell. This is an advanced method but extremely powerful for integrating into an automated documentation or deployment pipeline.

The General Concept:

Power BI Desktop runs a local instance of the Analysis Services tabular engine in the background. If you can find the port number it's running on, you can connect to it programmatically.

1. Find the Port: You can find the port that your PBIX file is using by looking in the local app data folder or, more easily, by having DAX Studio open. The port number is displayed in the bottom right corner of the DAX Studio window.
2. Use a PowerShell Script: Write a script using the Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Tabular library to connect to localhost:[your_port_number].
3. Iterate and Export: Once connected, the script can iterate through the model's object hierarchy (model.Tables, table.Measures) to read the name and DAX expression of each measure, writing them to a file.

This method offers the ultimate control but requires a solid understanding of PowerShell and the Tabular Object Model (TOM). It's overkill for a one-off task but fantastic for building repeatable, automated processes.

Pros: Fully automatable. Can be integrated into larger workflows. Cons: High complexity and requires scripting knowledge. The port changes with each Power BI session.

Final Thoughts

Whether you need a quick-and-dirty copy using the Performance Analyzer or a robust, structured export with DAX Studio, you now have a full toolkit for liberating your measures from a Power BI file. Mastering these techniques will save you countless hours on documentation, debugging, and migration, turning a frustrating task into a simple, efficient process.

Managing complex logic and DAX formulas in traditional BI tools often means spending more time on technical maintenance than on analysis. It’s why at Graphed, we’ve focused on a simpler approach. Instead of writing DAX, our users connect data sources like Shopify or Google Ads and create real-time dashboards just by asking questions in plain English, such as "Compare ad spend vs. revenue by campaign for the last 30 days." We handle the process of creating the visuals and reports, letting you focus on the insights, not the formulas.