A few years ago I wrote this post on how to alias columns in a table in DAX, using a combination of AddColumns() and Summarize(). The good news is that in Excel 2016/the Power BI Designer/SSAS Tabular 2016 there’s a new DAX function specifically for this purpose: SelectColumns(). Here’s an example of how it can be used:

Imagine you have the following source table, called Products:

You can write a DAX query to get all the rows and columns from this table like so:

Here’s the output of that query in DAX Studio (and remember, DAX Studio can connect to data loaded into the Power BI Designer, which is what I’m doing here):

You can alias the columns in this table using SelectColumns() very easily, like so:

Here’s the output:

The syntax for SelectColumns() is straightforward: the first parameter is a table expression, and after that there are pairs of…