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PL-300 · Question #2

Case Study 1 - Litware, Inc. Overview Litware, Inc. is an online retailer that uses Microsoft Power Bl dashboards and reports. The company plans to leverage data from Microsoft SQL Server databases…

The correct answer is A. FORMAT('Date'[date],"MMM YYYY"). The FORMAT() DAX function takes a value and a format string and returns a text representation. The format string 'MMM YYYY' produces a three-letter month abbreviation followed by a four-digit year (e.g., 'Jan 2024'), which matches the requirement. Option A, FORMAT('Date'[date]…

Submitted by jaden.t· Apr 18, 2026Model the data

Question

Case Study 1 - Litware, Inc. Overview Litware, Inc. is an online retailer that uses Microsoft Power Bl dashboards and reports. The company plans to leverage data from Microsoft SQL Server databases, Microsoft Excel files, text files, and several other data sources. Litware uses Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to authenticate users. Existing Environment Sales Data Litware has online sales data that has the SQL schema shown in the following table. In the Date table, the dateid column has a format of yyyymmdd and the month column has a format of yyyymm. The week column in the Date table and the weekid column in the Weekly_Returns table have a format of yyyyww. The regionid column can be managed by only one sales manager. Data Concerns You are concerned with the quality and completeness of the sales data. You plan to verify the sales data for negative sales amounts. Reporting Requirements Litware identifies the following technical requirements:

  • Executives require a visual that shows sales by region.
  • Regional managers require a visual to analyze weekly sales and

returns.

  • Sales managers must be able to see the sales data of their respective

region only.

  • The sales managers require a visual to analyze sales performance

versus sales targets.

  • The sale department requires reports that contain the number of sales

transactions.

  • Users must be able to see the month in reports as shown in the

following example: Feb 2020.

  • The customer service department requires a visual that can be

filtered by both sales month and ship month independently.

  • The maximum allowed latency to include transactions in reports is

five minutes. You need to create a calculated column to display the month based on the reporting requirements. Which DAX expression should you use?

Options

  • AFORMAT('Date'[date],"MMM YYYY")
  • BFORMAT('Date' [date_id], "MMM YYYY")
  • CFORMAT('Date'[date],"M YY")
  • DFORMAT('Date'[date_id], "MMM") & "" & FORMAT('Date'[year], "#")

How the community answered

(50 responses)
  • A
    82% (41)
  • B
    4% (2)
  • C
    12% (6)
  • D
    2% (1)

Explanation

The FORMAT() DAX function takes a value and a format string and returns a text representation. The format string 'MMM YYYY' produces a three-letter month abbreviation followed by a four-digit year (e.g., 'Jan 2024'), which matches the requirement. Option A, FORMAT('Date'[date], "MMM YYYY"), correctly references the [date] column - which holds actual date values - and applies the appropriate format string. Option B uses [date_id], which stores dates as integers in yyyymmdd format, not as Date type values; applying MMM YYYY to an integer will not produce a readable date string. Option C uses "M YY", which would produce a numeric month (e.g., '1 24') rather than an abbreviated month name and full year. Option D constructs an unnecessarily complex concatenation across multiple columns with incorrect syntax and references [year] as a separate column, which adds fragility and does not produce the required output cleanly.

Topics

#DAX#Calculated Columns#Date Formatting#FORMAT function

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