How to Turn On QA in Power BI

Power BI’s Q&A feature lets you use plain English to ask questions about your data and get answers in the form of interactive charts and graphs. Instead of manually dragging fields and picking visuals, you can simply type a question like "what were our total sales last quarter by region?" and watch Power BI build the visual for you. This guide will walk you through how to turn on and optimize the Q&A feature to make your reports dramatically more user-friendly.

What is Power BI Q&A and Why Should You Use It?

The Q&A feature is Power BI's built-in natural language query engine. It bridges the gap between complex data models and everyday business questions. This is incredibly powerful for empowering team members who might not be comfortable in the report editor but know exactly what information they need.

Think of it as having a conversation with your data. By enabling Q&A, you allow users (and yourself) to move beyond pre-built visuals and explore insights on the fly. It encourages curiosity and allows for a much deeper level of data discovery without requiring any technical dashboard-building skills.

The main benefits of using Q&A include:

Accessibility: Anyone on your team can ask questions and get answers, regardless of their Power BI expertise.
Speed to Insight: Get answers to ad-hoc questions in seconds instead of waiting for a data analyst to modify a report.
Flexibility: Explore your data from different angles without being limited to the charts already on the page.

Two Ways to Use Q&A in Power BI

You can add Q&A functionality to your reports in two primary ways: by adding a dedicated Q&A visual or by using a button that triggers a Q&A pop-up. The process is straightforward for both.

1. Adding the Q&A Visual Directly to Your Report

For reports where a conversational approach is central, you might want the Q&A box front and center. Placing a dedicated visual on the report canvas invites users to start asking questions immediately.

Follow these steps:

Open your report in Power BI Desktop. Make sure you have the data model loaded and are in the Report view (the first icon in the left-hand navigation).
Navigate to the Visualizations pane. On the right side of your screen, you'll see a panel with all the available chart types.
Find and select the Q&A icon. It looks like a speech bubble with a 'Q' and 'A' inside. Clicking this will add the Q&A visual to your report canvas.
Tip: If you don't see the icon immediately, make sure no other visuals on the canvas are selected. You can click on any blank space in the report to deselect everything.
Position and resize the visual. You can drag the visual to place it wherever you'd like and resize it by dragging its corners, just like any other Power BI visual.

Once added, the visual will display a question box and might offer some suggested questions based on its initial analysis of your data, like "top products by sales" or "total revenue." Users can now click into the box and start typing their questions.

2. Triggering Q&A with a Button

If you want to save space on your report canvas or want a more guided user experience, you can use a button to launch the Q&A interface.

Go to the 'Insert' tab in the Power BI Desktop ribbon at the top of the screen.
In the 'Elements' section, click on 'Buttons' and select a button type (a blank button is often best for this).
With the new button selected on your canvas, go to the 'Format' pane on the right.
Expand the 'Action' menu and turn it On.
For the 'Type,' select 'Q&A' from the dropdown list. You can also customize the button text (e.g., "Ask a Question") in the 'Style' menu.

Now, when a user clicks this button in the viewer mode, a Q&A window will pop up, letting them ask questions without needing a permanent visual on the canvas.

Critically Important: Optimizing Your Data for Q&A

Simply turning on Q&A is only half the battle. If your underlying data model has messy, technical, or unclear table and column names, the Q&A engine will struggle to understand your users' questions. To get accurate and reliable results, you need to clean up and enhance your data model behind the scenes.

Here’s your checklist for creating a Q&A-friendly data model.

1. Use Clear, Natural Naming Conventions

Users ask questions using everyday language, so your data model should reflect that. Rename your tables and columns from cryptic database jargon to simple, descriptive terms.

Bad Table Name: Fact_Sales_Data_Q3_Temp
Good Table Name: Sales

Bad Column Name: customer_first_nm
Good Column Name: Customer First Name

You can easily rename any table or column in the Model view or the Data pane by double-clicking on its name and typing a new one. This single step can make one of the biggest differences in how well Q&A performs.

2. Build Proper Table Relationships

Power BI Q&A needs to understand how your tables relate to one another to answer questions that span across different data sets. For example, to answer "show sales by customer city," Power BI needs to know how the Sales table is connected to the Customers table.

Go to the Model view in Power BI Desktop. Drag a field from one table to the corresponding field in another (e.g., drag CustomerID from the Sales table to the CustomerID field in the Customers table) to create a relationship. Make sure your relationships are accurate and clearly defined.

3. Data Categorization and Formatting

Help Power BI understand the type of data in a column. Is it a location? A date? A URL? By setting these categories, you get better visualizations.

Select a column (like City, State, or Country) in the Data view.
Go to the 'Column tools' tab at the top.
Click the 'Data category' dropdown and select the appropriate category (e.g., City, State or Province, Country/Region).

When you do this, asking a question like "sales by state" will automatically generate a map visual instead of just a table or bar chart.

4. Teach Q&A Your Vocabulary with Synonyms

Your team might use internal jargon or alternative terms for certain metrics. For example, some might call customers "clients," revenue "income," or users "visitors." You can teach the Q&A engine these synonyms through its dedicated tooling menu.

To access this feature, click the gear icon on your Q&A visual, which opens the Q&A setup menu.

Navigate to 'Tooling'. Here you can manage your data model's linguistic schema.
Go to 'Manage synonyms'. You'll see a list of your tables and columns.
Add your own synonyms. For the 'Sales Revenue' field, you might add synonyms like "income," "profit," or "earnings." For your 'Customers' table, you can add "clients" or "accounts."

This menu also lets you review questions users have asked, which can give you great ideas for new synonyms or clarifications to add.

5. Guide Users with Featured Questions

Don't present users with a blank box. Give them a starting point with featured questions. In the Q&A setup menu, navigate to 'Suggest questions' and add a few of the most common or important questions analysts of this report will likely have. For example:

What were our sales for the last 30 days?
Top 5 customers by revenue this year
Show me a trend of website traffic over time

These will show up beneath the Q&A box as soon as a user clicks on it, giving them both valuable information and examples of how to phrase their own queries.

Final Thoughts

By enabling and properly configuring the Q&A feature in Power BI, you transform your reports from static displays into interactive, conversational tools. This makes data more accessible to everyone in your organization, empowering them to find the answers they need to make smarter, data-driven decisions without having to learn the complexities of a BI tool.

While Power BI's Q&A is fantastic for exploring a curated data model, we wanted to take that conversational approach and apply it across an entire business. At Graphed, we’ve made it possible to ask questions of all your marketing and sales data sources at once - like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Shopify - and build entire real-time dashboards from scratch. Instead of spending days modeling data, you just connect your apps, describe what you want to see in plain English, and get immediate insights. Check out Graphed to see how simple data analysis can be.