Creating Visuals with Q&A

With the world, growing advanced and apparently swifter by every passing second, the struggle to get the required information in the shortest and quickest possible time is becoming equally intense. It is because of the fact that the concept of multi-tasking has evolved enough that people prefer to have everything within the reach of their hand.

Why Instant Information Matters Today

To put it bluntly, everyone likes to get exactly what he or she asks for with least amount of effort. The most renowned search engine, such as Google, catered to this need of people in an exquisite manner. If not all, majority of people resort to google to search for almost anything.

Google Did It First—Now Power BI Does It Better

Now imagine ‘telling’ a software solution what you want from it. Yes, you heard it right! A solution that is powerful enough to provide you with exact information you need. If you are still confused about the existence of such a solution, then let us unfold the curtains and tell you that it is about time you get to know this compelling software solution better known as Power BI.

So let us dig into one of the most attractive features that power BI delivers its users with: The Visuals. Visuals are the need of every business, big or small, new or old. They are an easy to understand representation of data that looks equally appealing and much more organized.

Ask in Natural Language, Get Visual Answers

Yet, what sort of visuals to use and where to find such visuals? These tasks might seem daunting but not anymore. With the help of Power BI, you can build visuals by just asking questions in your natural language and let the software do the rest for you.

Power BI is very well equipped with Artificial Intelligence that enables it to construct a visual that can answer your question/s.

Although Microsoft Power BI provides incredible options to create reports and dashboards, there are still some questions that a dashboard will not be answering. This is true especially true when a non-technical business executive uses the dashboard with different requirements.  

Now what if the user can ask questions related to the data in their own language? 

This blog post walks through the amazing Q&A feature of Power BI.

Lets try this by asking our first question

Lets try this by asking our first question. For this you need to log on in your Power BI service.  Click Sales Dashboard inside Power BI Service.

Here comes our first question, What is the the total profit.  Click Q&A field on the upper-left corner of the Dashboard and start by typing “P”

Using IntelliSense in Power BI Q&A

Notice that it starts suggesting fields and items starting with the letter “P. This feature is called intellisense. This feature used the Power BI’s built in recommendation engine to offer you with the options that you might be interested in. 

Now we need to enter our choice into the system. For this type Profit and hit Enter

Here you go!

You will get total profit figure as a result visualized in a Card
Congratulations! You just asked a question and got correct answer from Q&A.

Lets try some other examples to make use of this powerful feature. 

Use of aggregation in Q&A

Creating Pie Chart with Q&A

Creating bar graph with Q&A

Type “profit before July by retailer type by order method type as column sort by profit” in the Q&A field.

Creating Area chart with Q&A

In the question box type “month year 2016 revenue and month year 2017 as area chart” in the Q&A Selection

Now click on on the suggestions.

An area chart showing the trend of revenue over the span of two years is created.
Click on the Pin visual icon at the top.

Select the dashboard. Click OK. Your visual is pinned to the dashboard. 

If you found this interesting and want to Learn Power BI from Scratch or its advanced features, get a complete, in-depth introduction to Microsoft Power BI tool by attending our Power BI Basic Training Course. There are countless features waiting for you to explore them. So, what is stopping you from exploring your full potential?