Copilot and Power BI: The Perfect Pair for Business Intelligence

In today’s fast paced business world, taking quick and informed business decisions is of paramount importance. Businesses are focusing on analyzing data to get useful insights from it so that data-driven decisions can be made. But the sheer amount of data can sometimes be overwhelming and analyzing them to get actionable insights also could be complicated and time-consuming process. This is where Power BI has made a massive impact due to its Low-Code/No-code interface. With Microsoft Power BI, one can connect to various data sources and perform data analysis with ease. They can create stunning reports and dashboards which will be easier to understand and share with the stakeholders. With using Power BI, one can create these reports using its drag and drop feature.

Copilot is an AI assistant developed by Microsoft which is tailored to make the life easier for business users. Copilot has already been integrated to Microsoft Productivity tools to increase the productivity of the users and save their time. With the integration of Copilot with Power BI, the user experience of Power BI has literally gone to the next level. Although Power BI is a Low-Code/No-code platform, ordinary business users had a steep learning curve to effectively use it to create reports and dashboards. But by using Copilot with Power BI, users can simply give the prompt on the Power BI interface to create the exact visuals and reports they need to create. There are a lot of features that Power BI with Copilot offers. Let’s understand each one of them.

Generating Report Summary:

Copilot in Power BI helps you to generate the summary of the entire report in the copilot pane. Users can generate the summary of a particular visual or even on a particular metrics. Users can also ask a question based on a particular visual for aiding their understanding. Now, all of these can be done even if the user does not have edit access to the report. You can also ask customized prompts, asking copilot to give summary in bulletin points or anything else. There is also a way to create a summary on the semantic model. This will help the users explore new insights on their data.

Create a Report Page:

Copilot in Power BI will also help you create an entire report page based on the user’s prompt. User can give a high-level prompt to get a complete report. Copilot for Power BI will be able to track the tables, columns and measures needed for creating the required report. If needed the user can give new prompts to make changes on the created report or also can use the edit buttons on the visuals to make changes.

Create a Summary visual on the Report Page:

Using Copilot in Power BI you can create a summary visual in Power BI. You may use the narrative visual to get a summary of the entire report page. You can also create a summary for a selected visual as well. This adds to the Power of storytelling using Power BI. This feature is available both on Power BI Desktop as well as Power BI Service.

Ask Questions based on the model:

Using Copilot in Power BI, users will be able to ask questions based on the data within the model. Copilot is quick to search if the answer is already present on any of the existing visuals on the report. Otherwise, it will create a visual for you to answer your questions.

Adds Synonyms for Q&A

Copilot in Power BI will write synonyms for certain columns and measures which you can add to the ‘Synonyms’ in order to enhance the ability of Q&A visual to better understand the questions from end users.

Create DAX queries:

You can use Copilot in Power BI to create DAX queries by giving prompts in natural language. You can explain in the DAX query view as to what results you expect. Copilot will execute and give the DAX query as a result. You can use the ‘Run’ button to execute the query there and click on ‘Keep it’ to add that DAX query to the model. You may also put in a DAX query and ask Copilot to explain what the DAX query does. This is an extremely useful feature as many business users find it difficult to learn DAX at a go. They can use this feature to create DAX query, understand them and subsequently learn them by using.

Copilot for Power BI gives more strength to Power BI and underlines its tagline as a low-code/no-code tool. It gives a normal business user the ability to manage and analyze their large business data and get meaningful insights and reports by just using natural language queries. It also helps the users get the summaries of the report in bulletin points. More importantly, it also helps users deal with the DAX query which otherwise would be little difficult for normal business users. In short, Copilot adds more value to Microsoft Power BI and also makes life easier for business users making them more effective and fast in their decision making.

About CloudThat

Established in 2012, CloudThat is a leading Cloud Training and Cloud Consulting services provider in India, USA, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Being a pioneer in the cloud domain, CloudThat has special expertise in catering to mid-market and enterprise clients from all the major cloud service providers like AWS, Microsoft, GCP, VMware, Databricks, HP, and more. Uniquely positioned to be a single source for both training and consulting for cloud technologies like Cloud Migration, Microsoft Power Platforms, DevOps, IoT, and the latest technologies like AI/ML, it is a top-tier partner with AWS and Microsoft, winning more than 8 awards combined in 11 years. Recently, it was recognized as the ‘Think Big’ partner from AWS and won the Microsoft Superstars FY 2023 award in Asia & India. Leveraging its position as a leader in the market, CloudThat has trained 650k+ professionals in 500+ cloud certifications and delivered 300+ consulting projects for 100+ corporates in 28+ countries.