Q&A visualization

The Q&A visual provides a question-and-answer interface that uses natural language processing to generate visual representations of your data. By asking questions in natural language, this makes it easier for report consumers or even report designers to quickly generate insights from the data used in this report.

Power BI will attempt to choose the “best” visual to display your data. As with all visuals, you can choose to change the visual just by highlighting the visual and choosing another one from the build visual area.

Figure 9.24 – Q&A visual showing gross revenue by sale product category

The Q&A visual has these core characteristics:

• A question entry box where the natural-language query is entered.
• A list of suggested questions will be generated based on the data model.
• A button that takes the query result and generates another visual displaying the same information.
• A settings button that allows you to change the Q&A settings. For more information on this, please see Chapter 6, Using Data Model Advanced Features.

Now that we’ve reviewed the different kinds of visualizations, let’s look at how we can configure those visualizations to meet the reporting needs of our organization.

Formatting and configuring visualizations

There are many ways you can customize the visuals in Power BI. There are options for fonts, colors, and sizes to name a few. There are near-constant improvements in visual customization, so be sure to take the time to explore the options that are available for each visual.

To get better acquainted, look at the clustered column chart visual and see how the formatting options are grouped; notice the default configurations. It’s helpful to know the defaults for the visual and how each can be customized.

Each visual can be configured independently, so select a visual on the canvas and then click the Format button to view the Format pane and change the configuration of the selected visual.