Aliasing Columns in DAX

Creating a copy of a column with a new name is pretty simple in DAX: you can just use the AddColumns() function. For example if we take a model with the DimProductCategory table from Adventure Works in, we could create a copy of the EnglishProductCategoryName column like so:

evaluate
addcolumns(
DimProductCategory
, "Copy of Category Name"
, DimProductCategory[EnglishProductCategoryName])

However, in some calculations and queries I’ve been playing around with, this isn’t enough: I’ve not only needed to create a copy of the column but also to remove the original. So for example to crossjoin the DimProductCategory table with itself and get a cartesian product of all the possible combinations of Category name you can’t just do this:

evaluate
crossjoin(
summarize(
DimProductCategory
, DimProductCategory[EnglishProductCategoryName])
,
summarize(
DimProductCategory
, DimProductCategory[EnglishProductCategoryName])
)

Because you’ll get the following error:

 Function CROSSJOIN does not allow two columns with the same name ‘DimProductCategory’[EnglishProductCategoryName].

What you need to do is add the new column with AddColumns() and then use Summarize() to get a new table that only contains the values in this new column, like so:

evaluate
crossjoin(
summarize(
DimProductCategory
, DimProductCategory[EnglishProductCategoryName])
,
summarize(
addcolumns(
DimProductCategory
, "Copy of Category Name"
, DimProductCategory[EnglishProductCategoryName])
, [Copy of Category Name])
)