It can work on data stored in an Excel table (or in a database via the on-premises gateway if you enable Q&A for the data set) or you can use Power Pivot to optimize the data set for Q&A. Power BI Q&A works in the Power BI website and the iOS Power BI app. Q&A uses the names of tables, columns, and calculated fields in the data sets if the column is called “area” rather than “region,” you need to ask for “sales by area” unless you add synonyms, and table names such as CustomerSummary will make Q&A less natural than names like Customers. If you own the data set, you can also add featured questions in the dashboard settings. If the question turns out to be extremely useful, you can pin the visualization to the dashboard, making this an easy way to create visualizations for a data set. If there are tiles pinned to the dashboard, Q&A will suggest those as questions, and as you type a question it will suggest terms you could add based on the tables in the data set. Specify how the data should be presented - ask for “total sales by region by month as a line” - or let Power BI pick a layout that suits the data with a more general question like, “What were the sales numbers for last quarter?” You can also use the natural language features of Power BI to ask questions and get visualizations in response. Tick “Add slider to this page” in the What-if parameter dialog to add a slider bar that you can drag to show the difference when the number of customer responses is higher or lower. That creates a calculated measure you can reference elsewhere so if you create a What-if parameter for the number of customers who respond to a particular promotion you can plug that into a formula you create to show how many customer support tickets you can expect to have to deal with. Add a calculated measure for a figure such as revenue and you can use the New Parameter button in Power BI Desktop to add parameters that change in your What-if scenario. You can compare scenarios in Excel, but Power BI lets you do it by dragging a slider bar to show changes. You can then use that to tell the history of your business, show how demand is growing, or explain anything else in which the sequence of events matters.
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Pick how to best represent, scale, and lay out your data, and Power BI will build a timeline from it.
You can also show a chronological list, a sequence that shows the duration of events, or pick relative or logarithmic scales.
With this tool, you can create a linear list of dates or times, or lay them out in circles, spirals, grids, or custom shapes. Tell stories with your dataĬharts are great for numbers, but if you want to show information that changes over time in a way that’s easy to understand, Power BI’s new Timeline Storyteller is for you. You can create your own reports and visualizations, perform calculations (Power BI calls these calculated measures), and set access levels for individual users, data sources, or specific dashboards and reports to control who can view more sensitive information. That way you can compare website visitors with sales, or see which promotions have brought in new customers. You can also set up the on-premises gateway to use Power BI to explore data sets on your own servers. If you use Xero for accounting, or K2 Cloud to build business processes, or Adobe Marketing Cloud, SAP HANA, Salesforce, MailChimp, Marketo, or Google Analytics, you can use Power BI to visualize the data you have in those services, create reports against them, and bring them together in a custom dashboard. Power BI has hundreds of content packs, templates, and integrations for hundreds of data services, apps, and services that include pre-set reports and visualizations.