PL-300 practice 1: margin by segment
Your manager wants to see where the margin is: by customer segment and product category. The model has the measures [Sales Amount] and [Total Cost].
Margin % is the margin as a share of sales. The totals must be ratios of totals, not averages of the cells above them.
Your task
Create Margin %: (Sales Amount minus Total Cost) divided by Sales Amount.
About this exercise
You practise exam-style task: ratios of measures with DIVIDE. The exercise runs on a small bike-shop model with a Sales fact table and Product, Customer and Date dimensions, the same star schema in every lesson.
Your measure, Margin %, fills a Power BI-style matrix grouped by Customer[Segment] and Product[Category]. As in a real report, each cell evaluates the measure in its own filter context, and the subtotals and the grand total are evaluated again in theirs rather than added up. When you check your answer, every cell is compared with the expected value, wrong cells are marked, and the hint is about the mistake you made.
Measures that already exist in the model: Sales Amount and Total Cost. Reference them in square brackets, for example [Sales Amount].
Where you start
Margin % =The result to build
| Category | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Segment | Accessories | Bikes | Clothing | Total |
| Business | 64.5% | 46.1% | 62.6% | 49.4% |
| Consumer | 66.4% | 48.1% | 63.6% | 51.2% |
| Total | 64.7% | 46.4% | 62.8% | 49.7% |
Last updated 10 November 2026
Opening the exercise…