Power BI Copilot: an AI assistant that empowers business intelligence

Power BI, a leader in business intelligence, is constantly evolving, not only allowing users to visualize data, but also interact with data in a more intuitive way. The latest exciting addition is Power BI Copilot, which is seamlessly integrated into the Power BI suite.

Copilot leverages the power of artificial intelligence to change the way businesses interact with data analytics. This tutorial will explain Power BI Copilot in detail so you can understand how it can simplify your data analytics workflow.

What is Power BI Copilot?

Power BI Copilot. Source: 2WTECH

For those unfamiliar with Power BI, it is a popular business analytics service from Microsoft. Power BI extracts and transforms data and provides beautiful visualizations to help organizations make better business decisions. DataCamp offers many courses for beginners who want to learn, such as Getting Started with Power BI.

Latest Supplement Power BI Copilot enhances the capabilities of Power BI using generative AI. Data professionals now discover, extract and analyze data faster by simply asking questions or requests in simple language.

In other words, with Power BI Copilot, Power BI users have a generative AI coding assistant that appears with their data, understands their business environment, and supports it in the following areas:

• Generate Reports: Power BI Copilot receives input in natural language to generate insightful reports.
• Suggested indicators and visualization effects: Power BI Copilot recommends which data visualization effect is the most suitable based on the characteristics of the data and the business environment.
• Generate narrative: Power BI Copilot will write a story that explains the data and the reasons behind the numbers.

In short, while other coding assistants only help with code generation, Power BI Copilot converts your data into engaging data narratives so that your organization can make better data-driven business decisions.

How Power BI Copilot works

Let's explore how Power BI Copilot works in terms of architecture and user experience. Understanding how Power BI Copilot works will help us word our tips for the most accurate and effective insights.

The architecture of Power BI Copilot

Power BI Copilot How to access data from various sources. Source: Microsoft

Like other language models, Power BI Copilot uses natural language processing (NLP) technology to understand the context and meaning behind text data.

More specifically, Power BI Copilot works because it has been trained on large datasets, when faced with new data, it converts words into numbers, and then can analyze sequences and relationships. Specifically, it uses the following machine learning techniques.

• Recurrent Neural Networks: RNN uses sequential data to solve language-related problems such as speech recognition or translation.
• Transformer: Transformer understands and generates human-like text by analyzing patterns in large amounts of text data.

After understanding the data context, Power BI Copilot uses its semantics and data modeling capabilities to find relationships and patterns in the data. It then provides targeted suggestions based on the user's natural language prompts.

User Experience of Power BI Copilot

The machine learning behind Power BI is amazing. Now let's take a look at the results of these algorithms in the user experience.

Power BI Copilot's recommendations are displayed with clear visualizations so that you can understand your data more easily. You can improve these suggestions and provide feedback in the Power BI Desktop interface, which will help improve Copilot over time.

Let's illustrate with an example: One might ask Power BI Copilot: "Create a page to analyze sales, revenue and profit margins over time and across regions for different products, categories and subcategories. " According to this tip, it can provide a complete product analysis, including sales performance for different products, and provide this information in a custom built dashboard. Please see:

The user-generated prompt for Power BI Copilot's dashboard. Source: Microsoft

You can see how the easy-to-use interface of Power BI Copilot enables it to interact seamlessly with it using natural language. You can ask questions about the data and get insightful feedback.

Overall, this is a faster, more natural, and more interactive way to accurately and effectively explore and analyze data. It's very convenient for data analysts and business intelligence professionals who are time-intensive and may have overloaded work.

Explore Power BI Copilot features and use cases

Let's check out the most ideal features and use cases for Power BI. Common use cases include semantic modeling, report creation, narrative generation, and more. As you will see, Power BI Copilot can be used for all parts of the data analysis life cycle.

Semantic modeling refers to building data in a meaningful and easy to understand way. This includes defining clear relationships between different data elements, organizing data hierarchies, and creating metrics and computed columns that express business logic. For example, in order to see how customers place orders for different products, we must have keys that connect these relationships. ### DAX formula suggestions

DAX (Data Analysis Expression) creates custom calculations on data stored in the data model. It is similar to Excel formulas, but has been enhanced to process relational data and perform dynamic aggregation. Surprisingly, Power BI Copilot can write these DAX queries for you, including highly custom calculations for report pages.

Report creation

One of the most eye-catching features of Power BI Copilot is its ability to create report pages with beautiful charts and graphics. Power BI Copilot uses generative AI to identify key trends, relationships, and patterns to create reports. By automated report creation, analysts save a lot of time compared to manually building reports through user interfaces.

Report page in Power BI Copilot. Source: Microsoft

Narration Generation

Power BI Copilot's equally striking but little-known use case is its narrative generation feature. Not only can analysts automate reports creation with Power BI Copilot, Power BI Copilot also generates narratives that summarize data insights. Power BI Copilot presents insights in a natural language format, making your reports easier to understand even for non-technical people.

Report summary in the Copilot pane

You can easily create a summary of any report page in the Copilot pane. This will help you quickly understand your reports. Even if you do not have permission to edit an organization's report, you can still understand the report without editing or changing the original Power BI report.

Summary of reports in the Power BI Copilot pane. Source: Microsoft

Visual summary in the Copilot pane

Copilot also allows you to automatically generate written summary or narratives about data visualizations and insights in Power BI reports. This summary is displayed as a visual element within the report itself.

Copilot analyzes data and creates a plain narrative that summarizes and explains key points, rather than manually writing explanations for each chart, graph, or table in a report.

Synonyms for Enhanced Question and Answer

When using Power BI reports, you can ask natural language questions about the data, which will understand the intent behind the problem to provide relevant insights. However, the way you ask questions may sometimes not match the terms used in the data model itself.

So, by providing synonyms, Copilot can understand a wider range of user problems.

Set the Q&A visualization in Power BI. Source: Microsoft

Report content suggestions

Power BI Copilot uses the power of artificial intelligence to analyze your data and provide you with different content suggestions. These suggestions may include:

• Suggested Reports: Power BI Copilot can suggest different report pages for you based on the unique characteristics of the data and business environment.
• Create visualizations: Power BI Copilot can create a variety of visualizations, from histograms to heat maps.
• Optimized tables: These are tables that store your data and connect them together to create reports.

Power BI Copilot can be a surprise by making suggestions for improvements—a question that users never even thought about asking.

How to enable Power BI Copilot using Microsoft Fabric

Your organization can only start using Copilot in Power BI after enabling Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-Service Platform (SaaS) that combines components of Power BI and other Microsoft services in a unified environment. Fabric is accessed by purchasing a Microsoft Azure subscription.

The following is a step-by-step guide on how to enable Power BI Copilot using Microsoft Fabric. The instructions vary slightly depending on whether your region is available to use Azure.

Enable Power BI Copilot if Azure is available in your region

If you can use Azure, here are the steps:

• Step 1: Access Microsoft Fabric's website and log in with your administrator account credentials.
• Step 2: Go to Fabric Settings and select Admin Portal from the menu options.
• Step 3: Open the Fabric Administration Portal and go to Tenant Settings. Here you can search for the Copilot settings of your organization.
• Step 4: Open the switch to enable Copilot in Fabric.

Enable Power BI Copilot with Microsoft Fabric. Source: Microsoft

The Open button will enable Copilot for all applications and services it can integrate with, not just Power BI. The last four steps in the Admin portal are quick.

• Step 5: First, search for the Copilot settings in the Azure OpenAI service (Preview version).
• Step 6: Turn on the switch so that it appears as Enabled.
• Step 7: Next, define who can access Copilot in Fabric.
• Step 8: Click the Apply Button to save all changes.

Enable Power BI Copilot if Azure is not available in your region

In addition to the above steps, if Azure is not available in your region, you must perform two additional steps to enable Power BI Copilot using MS Fabric:

• Step 9: Open the settings that appear as that sends data to Azure OpenAI can be processed outside your capacity geographic area.
• Step 10: Select Apply to save this change.

Enable Power BI Copilot with Microsoft Fabric when Azure is not available in your region. Source: Microsoft

Explore Power BI Copilot planning and pricing

The cost of using Fabric Copilot in Power BI depends on the number of prompts you send and the number of replies you receive. These interactions are measured using tokens, which can be words, spaces, or punctuation marks. The input token includes the text you typed in the Copilot chat and the metadata from the table. The output token includes Copilot generated code, Power BI reports, and text replies.

Luckily, Power BI will cache the input token for 2 days. When you rerun the same prompt for the same data, you will get faster responses and won't even charge.

Computing the capacity consumption cost (CU seconds) of Power BI Copilot interactions. Source: Microsoft

Advanced Tips and Best Practices

Here, we will review some best practices and useful keyboard shortcuts to take advantage of the power of Power BI Copilot.

Best Practice

The following are some heuristics:

1. Prepare data in advance: Data cleaning requires standardized naming conventions, delete duplicates, and ensure that the data type is correct. So prepare your data in advance instead of relying solely on Power BI Copilot to clean up and organize your data for you.
2. Computing complex metrics: Reduce the burden on Copilot by handling complex calculations in Power BI Desktop before using Copilot. This will simplify the report generation process when complex calculations are involved.
3. Try different tips: Explore the potential of Power BI Copilot by asking questions in natural language, and then use follow-up questions for a more in-depth discussion.
4. Improve Copilot's output: Use Copilot's formatting options to enhance the visual appeal and readability of generated reports. For example, if you don't like the chart type, you can ask Power BI Copilot to change the chart to a bar or line chart.
5. Record your prompt: Save the prompt you used to generate a report. You can refer to them later, saving time.
6. Combines your manual editing with Copilot's output: Combines your charts and data points with visualizations generated by Copilot for more custom reports.

Some useful keyboard shortcuts

The following are some universal keyboard shortcuts from Power BI that can simplify your workflow.

技術(shù)	描述
調(diào)整可視化大小	使用箭頭鍵
組合可視化效果	選擇可視化效果 Ctrl G
顯示或隱藏工具提示	Ctrl H
選擇或取消選擇數(shù)據(jù)點(diǎn)	Enter 或空格鍵
移動(dòng)畫布上的可視化效果	使用箭頭鍵（上、下、右、左）
畫布放大	Ctrl 加號(hào)
畫布縮小	Ctrl 減號(hào)
在畫布周圍移動(dòng)	使用箭頭鍵（上、下、右、左）
與切片器交互	使用向上箭頭鍵和向下箭頭鍵在菜單項(xiàng)之間移動(dòng)焦點(diǎn)
從切片器中選擇多個(gè)連續(xù)項(xiàng)	Shift 向上箭頭鍵/向下箭頭鍵，然后 Shift F10 打開上下文菜單

The final idea about fast data analysis with Power BI Copilot

Power BI Copilot is a revolutionary tool in the business intelligence field that seamlessly integrates AI to enhance data analytics. Learning Power BI is crucial for those who aim to improve their skills. Additionally, understanding large language models in business and taking large language model concept courses will deepen your understanding of the advanced features that Power BI Copilot offers.

With the launch of Power BI Copilot, it has become easier to implement AI solutions in enterprises. This tool helps generate reports, suggest metrics, and create narratives, making it a valuable resource for data analysts and business intelligence professionals. By mastering Power BI Copilot, users can significantly increase their productivity and lead to more insightful, data-driven decisions.

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