5: Enhancing the experience in the Power BI Service
5.8 Setup and use Q&A
5: Enhancing the experience in the Power BI Service
5.8 Setup and use Q&A - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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<v Instructor>Okay, in this sublesson</v> we're gonna discuss what Q&A is, and is useful for. We're gonna use Power BI Q&A to explore your data. And we're gonna create a visual with Q&A. But first, let's go ahead and get ourselves back to the Power BI service and into the dashboard that we've been working with in previous sublessons. Okay, so we are back in the Power BI service. And I have the dashboard that we've been working with previously open. And what we're gonna do here is go ahead and take advantage of Q&A. And Q&A is a really useful piece of functionality in Power BI to allow people to query their data using English language in this case here. So what we're gonna do is, we can go into this section up above here, at the very top of the dashboard, you're gonna see this thing here that says, "Ask a question about your data." So what we're gonna do here, is we're just gonna put our cursor in there. And I'm just gonna type in, "show". Let's do this properly here. Let's go, "show total sales". And as we can see, every time we type something out a visualization is being drawn in behind the scenes. So here is my total sales, unrestricted, for our dataset. But maybe I want to see this by product name. (keyboard clacking) Like so. Okay, so now a brand new visualization is drawn out. And Power BI is actually choosing what it feels is the best visualization to actually use, based on the information you are typing in. And if we feel that there's a better visualization for it, we can just go ahead and type that in. So I can maybe say, "On a pie chart". And if I feel like that was the best visual to go ahead and use, I could do that, although not really a good visual to use. But I just want to show, you have the ability to go ahead and control the visualization itself. So let's just back up here, so we can actually get to there. So once we have this here, we can actually take this visual and actually pin it into our dashboard if we wanted to. So go ahead and do that. We can say into "Existing dashboard", go ahead and pin there. We won't go ahead and take a look at that, because I want to talk about the Q&A piece here a little bit more first. So we can see on the right-hand side of the screen here, we have our Fields pane, and the Visualizations pane as well. So if I wanted to, I could actually choose other types of visuals for this. So if I wanted to maybe put this into, you know, a stacked column chart, if that made sense. I could go here into stacked bar, if that made sense. A bunch of different visualizations I could go ahead and pick. So the nice thing is that the Q&A engine got us started, and got us to a certain point, but we could then go in here and add additional filters. We can change the visual itself. Over here in the Fields pane, we can take a look at the fields that have actually been included in the actual visualization itself. So there still is some customization that we can actually do to this visualization if we saw fit. And this is kind of a nice way to go ahead and explore your data. And one feature that I really liked that I often demo in in-person classes, is actually showing how the Power BI mobile device, you can hook it to the voice commands on your phone. I happen to use an Apple iPhone, and I set up Siri, and I can actually speak into the actual app itself, and have it draw out visualizations like this, which is rather interesting in terms of how just interactive your data can start becoming now on things like the mobile device. Okay, so that's all we really wanted to show you here about Q&A. We really just focused on Q&A here in the Power BI service itself. There is actually more you can do from an administrative perspective with Q&A. And you can actually do more with Q&A on the desktop, in terms of refining the overall experience. But both of those are beyond the scope of this class. And we just wanted to introduce you into what Q&A is all about and what some of the things you can actually do with it are. Right, so that brings us to the end of this sublesson.