How to Enable Quick Insights in Power BI
Power BI’s Quick Insights feature automatically finds interesting correlations, outliers, and trends hidden in your data, saving you from hours of manual exploration. This analysis is a powerful head start, pointing you toward the most significant patterns without you having to build a single pivot table. This guide will walk you through exactly how to enable and use Quick Insights on both your datasets and individual dashboard tiles.
What Are Power BI Quick Insights?
Quick Insights is an artificial intelligence-driven feature within the Power BI service that uses a set of advanced statistical algorithms to analyze your dataset and surface potentially valuable findings. Think of it as having a junior data analyst on your team who can instantly scan your information and say, "Hey, you should take a look at this!"
Instead of you having to manually slice and dice your data, plotting every possible combination of metrics and dimensions, Quick Insights does the initial heavy lifting. It runs its analysis behind the scenes and then presents its findings as a collection of interactive visualizations on a pre-built dashboard.
This process can uncover several types of analytical findings, including:
Category Outliers: Flags categories that have significantly different values from the rest. For example, if one salesperson is dramatically outperforming all others.
Time Series Trends: Identifies long-term upward or downward trends in your data over time. You might see a steady increase in website traffic over the past year.
Seasonality: Detects repeating patterns in your time-stamped data, like a spike in sales that happens every December.
Steady Share: Points out when a parent category has a consistent or a changing market share relationship with one of its sub-categories. For instance, discovering that the North American market has consistently accounted for 40% of global sales.
Correlation: Finds statistical relationships where two or more metrics seem to move in relation to one another. You might find a strong correlation between advertising spend and new user sign-ups.
It's not meant to replace deep analysis but rather to accelerate it. By pointing out these areas of interest, it gives you a clear starting point for your own investigation.
Why Should You Use Quick Insights?
If you're already familiar with Power BI, you might wonder why you need a feature to do analysis for you. The benefits are all about efficiency and discovery.
1. It Saves a Ton of Time
The initial data exploration phase can be tedious. Before you even know what questions to ask, you often spend hours creating basic charts and tables just to get a feel for the data. Quick Insights automates this "getting to know you" phase, running dozens of calculations in minutes that might take a person hours to complete manually.
2. It Uncovers Patterns You Weren't Looking For
Perhaps the biggest advantage is its ability to find the "unknown unknowns." We often approach our data with preconceived notions and specific questions in mind. Quick Insights is unbiased, it simply looks for statistically significant patterns. You might be focused on analyzing revenue by product, but Quick Insights could find a powerful correlation between shipping times and customer satisfaction that you completely overlooked.
3. It Makes Data Analysis More Accessible
You don't need a degree in statistics to use Quick Insights. The algorithms are complex, but the output is not. Power BI presents the findings in simple charts with plain-language descriptions like "Sales has a high correlation with Marketing Spend." This lowers the barrier to entry, empowering team members who might not be data experts to discover valuable patterns on their own.
This is especially helpful for marketers, sales managers, or small business owners who are experts in their domain but not necessarily in data analysis. It bridges the gap, allowing them to gain data-driven insights without needing a dedicated analyst for every question.
How to Generate Quick Insights on a Full Dataset
You can run Quick Insights on an entire dataset published to the Power BI service (the web-based version of Power BI). This is the best approach when you first load a new dataset and want a high-level overview of what’s interesting within it.
Here’s the step-by-step process:
Step 1: Publish Your Report and Dataset to Power BI Service
Quick Insights is a feature of the Power BI service, not the Power BI Desktop application. This means you must first publish your report from Power BI Desktop to a workspace online.
In Power BI Desktop, once your data is loaded and modeled, go to the Home tab and click on the Publish button.
Select a destination workspace (like "My workspace") and publish your report. This automatically uploads both the report and the underlying dataset.
Step 2: Navigate to Your Workspace and Find the Dataset
Log into your Power BI account at app.powerbi.com. In the left-hand navigation pane, find and click on the workspace where you published your report.
Once inside the workspace, you will see a list of all your dashboards, reports, and datasets. Switch to the Datasets + dataflows tab to easily locate your dataset. Datasets have a distinct orange icon.
Step 3: Run Quick Insights
Hover over the name of the dataset you want to analyze. To the right of the name, you’ll see several options appear. Click on the three vertical dots (…), which stand for "More options."
From the dropdown menu that appears, select Get quick insights.
That's it! Power BI will now start running its algorithms on your data in the background. You'll see a small notification in the top right corner of the screen that says "Searching for insights..."
Step 4: View Your Insights
The time it takes to generate insights can vary from a few seconds to several minutes, depending on the size and complexity of your dataset. Once the process is complete, the notification will update to let you know that your insights are ready.
Click on the View insights button in that notification to open the insights dashboard. If you miss the notification, don't worry. You can always get back by clicking the "More options" (...) menu next to the dataset again, the option will now have changed to "View insights."
How to Read and Use the Quick Insights Dashboard
Power BI presents the results on a special auto-generated dashboard. This dashboard contains a series of tiles, with each tile representing one insight and its corresponding visualization.
Each tile includes:
A Title and Description: A clear, plain-English summary of the finding (e.g., "Total units sold shows a trend").
A Visualization: A chart (line, bar, scatter, etc.) that graphically represents the insight.
Related Columns: The name of the columns from your dataset used in the analysis.
You can interact with this dashboard just like any other in Power BI:
Pin Useful Tiles: If you find a particular insight valuable, you can pin its tile to one of your regular dashboards for easy access and continuous monitoring. Simply hover over the tile and click the pin icon.
Enter Focus Mode: To see a larger view of a specific visualization, click on the insight tile. This opens it in a "Focus mode" where you can see the chart in more detail and review the filters that Power BI applied to generate it.
Interact with Charts: In Focus mode, you can often hover your mouse over parts of the chart to see specific data points, just as you would in a regular report.
Generating Quick Insights on a Single Dashboard Tile
What if you don't need insights on your entire dataset? Sometimes, you have a specific visual in an existing report and want to dig deeper into what it's showing. Power BI lets you run Quick Insights on individual dashboard tiles, which "scopes" the analysis to only the data present in that visual.
This is especially helpful for discovering the "why" behind an observation. For example, if you have a tile showing a sudden sales drop last month, running Quick Insights on just that tile can help you find what drove that specific change.
Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Go to an Existing Dashboard
Navigate to one of your dashboards in the Power BI service that contains a visual you want to investigate further.
Step 2: Find the Tile and Access "More Options"
Hover your mouse over the top-right corner of the dashboard tile you want to analyze. The three-dot icon (...) for "More options" will appear.
Step 3: Select "View Insights"
Click the "More options" icon, and from the dropdown menu, click View insights.
Power BI will now perform an analysis, but this time it is limited only to the data being used in that specific tile. The insights will appear in a pane on the right-hand side of your screen, overlaid on your main dashboard. No new page is loaded. These visuals are typically called "scoped insights."
You can scroll through these focused insights to better understand trends, contributors, and outliers within that specific piece of your data story.
Best Practices for Getting Meaningful Insights
Quick Insights is powerful, but the quality of its output is directly related to the quality and structure of your input data. Here are a few tips to get the best results.
Emphasize Data Quality: Ensure your data is clean before you analyze it. Blank values, inconsistent formatting, or incorrect data types can confuse the algorithms and produce weak or nonsensical insights.
Include Time-Series Data: Many of the most valuable insights (trends, seasonality) rely on a date or time field. If your data doesn't have a time component, you're missing out on a huge portion of what Quick Insights can offer.
Create a Good Mix of Data Types: For the algorithms to find interesting relationships, your dataset should have a good balance of numerical measures (like revenue, quantity, profit) and categorical dimensions (like product category, region, customer segment).
It's a Starting Point, Not an End Point: Remember that Quick Insights is a discovery aid. It points you where to look, but it doesn't always provide the full context. Treat its findings as strong hypotheses that are worth investigating further with your own domain expertise.
Final Thoughts
Power BI's Quick Insights is an excellent feature for accelerating discovery and finding patterns that human analysis might miss. By leveraging a suite of AI-driven statistical models, it automatically surfaces trends, correlations, and outliers on both entire datasets and individual dashboard visuals, giving you a powerful head start in your data exploration.
While tools like Power BI provide fantastic built-in features, we love finding ways to make data analysis even more direct and conversational. With Graphed, we apply a similar but even more intuitive approach by letting you simply ask questions in plain English. Instead of navigating menus to find insights, you can connect your sources and ask directly: "Show me a dashboard of trends in my Shopify sales data," and our AI builds it for you in real-time, helping you get from data to decision in seconds.