I have been working on Power BI for a while now and I often get confused when I browse through help topics of it. They often refer to the functions and formulas being used as DA
Think of Power Query / M as the ETL language that will be used to format and store your physical tables in Power BI and/or Excel. Then think of DAX as the language you will use after data is queried from the source, which you will then use to calculate totals, perform analysis, and do other functions.