Working with Q&A

Quick reference

• 00:04 What I wanna show you now is something really cool, it's called Q&A.
• 00:08 And what this is,
• 00:09 it's a natural language query interface to ask the system questions about your data.
• 00:15 I've signed into the Power BI service again, and the reason being is because
• 00:19 Q&A only works online, it does not work in Power BI Desktop.
• 00:24 When I sign in, it takes me immediately to my Recent items, you'll notice here.
• 00:29 And you can see that the two items I've been playing around with were
• 00:32 the Loaded Pencil report with this icon, and the Loaded Pencil dashboard.
• 00:36 Now, if I want my dashboard to come up first and
• 00:38 foremost, I can click little star and it'll now actually put it in Favorites.
• 00:43 And now when I sign in it'll give me this as a priority item,
• 00:46 to say hey look this is one of your favorite dashboards.
• 00:48 So for right now I'm gonna click on it because Q&A works from a dashboard, and
• 00:53 where it actually works is it's right at the top here where it says,
• 00:57 Ask a Question about your data.
• 00:59 So I could go and click on this and you'll notice at this point it comes up and
• 01:02 it's got some fields down here for the loaded pencil.
• 01:05 But the nice little part about here is that I could go and
• 01:09 say show me sales by location.
• 01:12 And you'll notice that as I type that in, it actually goes in and
• 01:16 starts prompting me with some different pieces, that I can actually see and
• 01:21 build charts out of, which is kinda cool.
• 01:23 So I can say, well that's kinda neat but,
• 01:25 maybe I want something that I haven't built yet, how about sales by hour?
• 01:30 Now, you'll notice at this point that my stuff is not really sorted all that well
• 01:34 12, 11, 13, 20, 21, that's not good.
• 01:37 So let's try with sorted by hour.
• 01:42 And now we can actually go and see that it has sorted it by hour and
• 01:45 it would appear that for this fictional restaurant chain,
• 01:49 that the busy hours are between the 11 o'clock and, 1 o'clock hour.
• 01:53 So this obviously does a pretty heavy lunch train here, and
• 01:57 then remains pretty steady for the rest of the day.
• 02:00 So this is really kinda cool, this is a neat little feature, and
• 02:03 it works on dashboards that you share with other people.
• 02:06 I had a client once who told me he says yeah, he says I love this,
• 02:08 this was awesome because, he says I sent out a dashboard to my boss and
• 02:12 my boss phones me up and he says.
• 02:13 Ben he goes you didn't give me the report that I always need, so
• 02:16 he responded with well why don't you just ask the system cuz it'll give it to you.
• 02:20 Now, you gotta be a little careful because that can be a bit of a career shortening
• 02:24 move the way you see it, but the cool thing was is that he didn't have to
• 02:27 wait for my client to go and develop the report.
• 02:29 The boss could just go and type it in in natural language and boom,
• 02:32 the question came up.
• 02:33 So, now, instead of asking you all those crazy questions,
• 02:36 they can start asking the system.
• 02:38 And if they find something that they really like,
• 02:41 well check this out Pen Visual.
• 02:43 Pen which dashboard, I'm gonna put it on my loaded pencil dashboard.
• 02:46 So now, when I go back to my dashboard,
• 02:48 you'll see that not only do I have my total sales cards and whatnot,
• 02:52 I've also have my account of sales by hours, so that's pretty cool.
• 02:56 And I think buried somewhere over here there was my latest state, so
• 02:59 I'm gonna move that into screen where I can see it a little bit easier.
• 03:02 So this is kinda cool cuz now as you see you can start asking questions about your
• 03:06 data and getting more information.
• 03:08 But, there's a challenge with part of it, do I expect my users to go and
• 03:13 ask the system and say hey, give me sales by location.
• 03:16 Or would they be more likely to say, I'd like to see sales by pub?
• 03:20 Well the problem is is that inside my data set, pub doesn't exist anywhere.
• 03:25 So what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna flip back to Power BI Desktop, so
• 03:28 this is the original report that we're actually working with.
• 03:32 And what I'm gonna do now, is I'm gonna go and say,
• 03:35 all right, let's go back to the Relationship View.
• 03:39 And inside Relationship View, we have this little table that's showing here,
• 03:43 so this is all the field names.
• 03:45 Data shows us all the data, the visual canvas shows us that, but
• 03:49 Relationships is a special window.
• 03:51 Because when you come here, and you select your table and
• 03:54 go to Modeling, you get the option to provide synonyms for your data.
• 03:58 So I can select Synonyms and it says, all right, this is your sales table so
• 04:02 we have a location name.
• 04:03 Well I could come over to location name and I could say, let's call this pub or
• 04:07 comma restaurant.
• 04:11 I could go in and put it in something different for street,
• 04:14 city, I mean province.
• 04:15 There's another one that might be really useful for that might be state, we could
• 04:20 try spelling latitude out a little longer, and longitude, we could do the same thing.
• 04:25 We could go over here and call it longitude.
• 04:30 And if you have spelling errors that are really common in your organization,
• 04:34 you could actually fix things up like that as well.
• 04:36 So, all of these things here add extra ways that we can query Q&A,
• 04:41 how do you actually make them work?
• 04:43 Well, your gonna go back and your going to save your file, so
• 04:48 you can click on the Save icon and then once again, you can publish it.
• 04:54 Now at this point its going to say hey, would you like to replace your data set?
• 04:58 And that's okay, we're gonna say Y, let's replace it this will update it.
• 05:02 So, if we've updated any data by hitting the big refresh button here it would
• 05:05 stream it through all the steps that we've done,
• 05:08 then we can publish this back to Power BI.
• 05:10 And now we can say, let's go back and open it up in Power BI again, so
• 05:14 it'll reload the page for me that's nice.
• 05:17 And nothing looks any different here whatsoever,
• 05:19 what about that visual we made through Q&A that we pinned, is it gone?
• 05:23 Well let's go take a look, My Workspace,
• 05:25 let's go back to our loaded pencil dashboard.
• 05:28 Nope it's still there, that's cool, so now let's go back and try this out,
• 05:32 we'll ask a question about our data.
• 05:34 Let's go and say sales by pub, and look at that,
• 05:38 we can actually have it worked quite nicely.
• 05:41 And it will show us what what we're looking for here, sales by pub, by hour.
• 05:45 Can we actually get something?
• 05:46 I admit it's kinda an ugly chart, but it makes chart, which is the kinda cool
• 05:50 thing we've added a new term this industry specific to our data.
• 05:55 Or we can also use it to take out industry specific terms and
• 05:58 put them back into pure English.
• 06:00 Now, Q&A works in English, it's also in Preview and Spanish at the moment, and
• 06:04 I anticipate that they'll add more languages as time goes on.

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