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USERCULTURE DAX function now supported in Power BI Premium

Headshot of article author Ogbemi Ekwejunor-Etchie

As excited as we are to ship features and performance improvements, we are equally excited to unlock foundational capabilities for our customers. Large enterprises that leverage Power BI Premium tend to be global and subsequently multilingual. Over the years, we’ve made investments to enable multilingual business intelligence environments for our customers. As part of this journey, we shipped metadata translations, to translate the names of tables, columns, measures, and hierarchies in Power BI Premium. This first step has allowed BI pros to design and build models in Power BI supported languages.

Today, we are happy to announce support for the DAX UserCulture function in Power BI Premium. Combined with the field parameters feature, customers can create reports that natively translate table data to the locale defined by the viewer’s preferences in the Power BI service. Although this support is limited to Power BI Premium (for architectural reasons), we do hope to support customers on non-Premium workspaces at some point in the future. Overall, it’s another milestone in the journey to fully support multilingual environments in Power BI.

The `USERCULTURE()` function returns the culture code for the user. By default, the culture is selected based on the user’s operating system or browser settings.  In the following example, the UserCulture function returns the current day based on the default language set by the user. Check out how to modify the default language in the Power BI service here. For more examples, also check out how to create dynamic, customized titles for your Power BI visuals using expression-based titles in Power BI.

USERCULTURE() Formatted Weekday

DAX: FORMAT(TODAY(), "dddd", USERCULTURE())

Output:
de-DE        -- Dienstag
en-US        -- Tuesday
es-ES_tradnl -- martes
eu-ES        -- asteartea
it-IT        -- martedì
nl-NL        -- dinsdag
pl-PL        -- wtorek
ro-RO        -- marți
ru-RU        -- вторник
uk-UA        -- вівторок

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Please note that Power BI supports datasets with multiple locales as long as the dataset is hosted on Power BI Premium, Power BI Premium per User, or Power BI Embedded. Visit our documentation page for more details on the USERCULTURE function.