How to Use Quick Analysis in Power BI

Power BI is an incredible tool for building detailed dashboards, but sometimes you just need to find a starting point in your data without spending hours dragging and dropping fields. This is exactly what the Quick Analysis (or "Quick Insights") feature is designed for. This article will show you how to leverage this AI-driven tool to automatically uncover hidden patterns, trends, and correlations in your datasets.

What is Quick Analysis in Power BI?

Quick Analysis is one of Power BI's built-in artificial intelligence features that automates the initial phase of data exploration. Instead of you manually building visuals to look for interesting tidbits, Power BI runs a suite of advanced analytical algorithms against your dataset in the background. It then presents its findings as a collection of pre-made visuals, or "insight cards," that highlight potentially significant information you might have otherwise missed.

Think of it as having a junior data analyst on your team. You hand over a new spreadsheet, and minutes later, they return with a dozen charts pointing out things like:

• "Hey, it looks like sales for this product line are unusually high on weekends."

• "Did you know there's a strong correlation between website traffic and sales from this specific country?"

• "These three customer segments stand out as outliers in our revenue data."

The goal isn't to build a final, polished dashboard for you. Instead, it’s designed to spark curiosity, give you a solid head-start, and guide your analysis toward the most interesting areas of your business data.

When Should You Use Quick Analysis?

This automated feature is incredibly useful, but it shines brightest in specific situations. It's less about replacing in-depth analysis and more about accelerating it.

1. When You First Load a New Dataset

You’ve just imported data from a new source - maybe it's a financial export, a list of marketing leads, or an e-commerce sales report. Before you even think about what charts to build, running Quick Insights gives you a bird's-eye view of what's inside. It's the perfect way to familiarize yourself with the data's structure and uncover immediate, high-level talking points without any manual effort.

2. To Break Through "Analysis Paralysis"

Ever stared at a blank Power BI canvas with dozens of tables and columns, not knowing where to begin? We've all been there. Analysis paralysis is real. Quick Insights acts as a brainstorming partner, generating several potential avenues for exploration. Even if half the suggestions aren't relevant, the other half can provide the momentum you need to start building a valuable report.

3. For Rapid A/B Test Analysis

If you've run a marketing A/B test, Quick Insights can quickly compare the two groups and hunt for statistically significant differences in behavior. It can help surface correlations you weren't previously expecting, such as a variant performing particularly well only in a specific demographic or region.

4. To Empower Non-Analysts

Quick Insights democratizes data analysis. A sales manager, marketer, or product lead who isn't a Power BI expert can use it to get answers without having to learn the ins and outs of the report builder. It lowers the barrier to entry for a data-driven culture, allowing more people to pull value from company data.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Quick Insights in the Power BI Service

Contrary to what some beginners might think, the main "Quick Insights" feature isn't found in Power BI Desktop. It's a feature of the online Power BI Service, accessible through your web browser. It runs on the dataset, not on a report you've already built. Here’s how to use it:

1. Create and Publish Your Report: First, you need to have your data loaded into Power BI Desktop. Connect your sources (Excel, databases, etc.), clean up the data in Power Query, and build relationships in the Model view. Once your data model is ready, click the "Publish" button on the Home ribbon to send it to the Power BI Service.

2. Navigate to Your Workspace: Log into app.powerbi.com and go to the workspace where you published your report. In your workspace, you will see a few different items with similar names: the report, the dataset, and maybe a dashboard.

3. Find Your Dataset and Get Insights: Look for the item with the "Dataset" type. Datasets are the engine that powers your reports. Click on the three small dots (the "More options" menu) next to the dataset's name, then select "Get quick insights" from the dropdown menu.

4. Let Power BI Do the Work: After you click, Power BI will display a notification that it's searching for insights. This can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the size and complexity of your dataset. Power BI is now running its algorithms in the cloud to look for correlations, outliers, trends, and seasonality.

5. View and Explore the Insights: Once completed, you'll get another notification. Click "View insights" to be taken to a special dashboard page filled with "insight cards." Each card contains a visualization and a brief description of what it found.

You can interact with these cards in Focus mode to see them larger, and if you find one particularly valuable, you can click the pin icon to add it to a new or existing dashboard. It's a fantastic way to quickly seed a dashboard with interesting charts that can serve as the foundation for a more detailed report.

Using the "Analyze" Feature in Power BI Desktop

While the broader "Quick Insights" feature lives online, there is a similar, more targeted analysis tool available right within Power BI Desktop. It's called the "Analyze" feature, and it works on a single data point within a visual you have already created.

Let's say you've built a bar chart showing total sales by product category. You notice that sales for "Electronics" are way higher in June than in any other month. Naturally, your next question is, "Why?" The "Analyze" feature helps you answer that.

1. Create a Visual: Build any standard chart in Power BI Desktop, like a bar chart, line chart, or scatter plot.

2. Select a Data Point: On your chart, right-click the specific data point you want to investigate. For instance, right-click the "June" bar in your "Electronics" sales chart.

3. Select "Analyze": In the context menu that appears, hover over "Analyze." You’ll see options like "Explain the increase" (or decrease) or "Find where the distribution is different."

4. Review the Pop-up Insights: Clicking one of these options launches a pop-up window. Power BI rapidly generates several small charts and explanations, trying to identify what factors contributed to that specific value. It might show you, for example, that the jump in June was driven almost entirely by a single sub-category or by massive orders from a specific customer.

This feature is perfect for drilling down and finding the "why" behind the numbers you see in an existing report. You can even add these AI-generated visuals directly to your report page by clicking the plus (+) icon on the card.

Tips for Getting More Valuable Insights

Like any AI tool, the output you get from Quick Insights is highly dependent on the quality of the input you provide. Here's how to ensure the results are as useful as possible.

• Focus on Data Quality: Make sure your data is clean. Use descriptive and clear column headers (e.g., "Customer City" instead of "C_City_Txt"). Remove blank rows and correct obvious errors. The AI can better understand well-structured, tidy data.

• Build a Solid Data Model: The real power is unlocked when you have a proper data model with relationships defined between your tables (e.g., connecting a sales table to a customer table and a product table). This allows Power BI to find insights across different facets of your business.

• Use Your Business Judgment: Remember that correlation does not equal causation. The AI will find statistical patterns, but it lacks business context. For example, it might find a correlation between your ice cream sales and the number of shark attacks - both are driven by a third factor (hot weather). It's your job to interpret which insights are truly meaningful.

• Don't Treat It as the Final Answer: Use the generated insights as a jumping-off point. If Power BI tells you a certain country has an unusually high conversion rate, use that as a prompt to build a dedicated page in your report to investigate further. Ask follow-up questions and continue digging.

Final Thoughts

Power BI’s Quick Insights and Analyze features help bridge the gap between having raw data and discovering actionable information. They automate the often tedious process of initial exploration, allowing analysts to save time and business users to find answers without needing deep technical expertise. By letting AI handle the first pass, you can spend more of your time on strategy and decision-making.

We're passionate about making data accessible to everyone, not just data scientists. While Power BI's features are a great step, we built Graphed to take that simplicity even further. By connecting data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce, you can create entire dashboards just by describing what you want to see in plain English. This eliminates the learning curve entirely, lets you ask follow-up questions in a conversational way, and delivers real-time dashboards that empower your entire team to make smarter decisions without the manual work.