Customize a report with Q&A

Reports in Power BI

Maarten Van den Broeck

Content Developer at DataCamp

Q&A Capabilities

• Natural language queries (English)
• Auto-complete
• Spelling corrections
• Preview answers
• See words Q&A doesn't understand

How it works

• Ask for a column or measure by name: Actual Amount, Cost Center, Number of Expenditures
• Filtering and grouping with prepositions like for, by, grouped by, and where
• Example query: Actual Amount by Cost Center grouped by Date
• Natural language processing reads the query and decides on the proper visual

Requesting a specific visual

• Use as {visual name} to specify a visual
• as table, as treemap, as pie chart
• Limited control over the visual!
• Can convert from Q&A to the visual

Synonyms

• Multiple terms for the same column
• Use suggested values or define your own
• Treat these like actual column names
• Warning: don't overlap synonyms!

Managing terms with Teach Q&A

• Nouns: fields in the data
• Adjectives: filters for the data

Make Q&A work better

• Name columns and measures in a business-friendly manner: Actual Amount versus amt_act
• Create terms and synonyms as needed
• Provide sample questions for your data (using the Power BI Online service)

Let's practice!

Reports in Power BI