Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today we are going to look at the best Power BI tips and tricks. We’ll look at how you can use AI to analyze your data and come up with key insights. We’ll look at how you can embed your reports directly into Microsoft Teams and PowerPoint. We’ll even look at how you can gain access to preview features before anyone else. Let’s check this out. This brings us to tip number one. You can interact and understand your data using natural language. Up on the top tabs, let’s click on the one titled insert, and right here, in the AI visuals category, there’s a visual called Q&A. Let’s click on that and down below in the report editor, it now inserts a new visual and it says ask a question about your data. And down below I see various suggestions. So, let’s say I want to know the total revenue over the past three years. I can simply click on that and there I see it’s 6 million. Not bad for a cookie business. I’ll close out of that. And right here, let’s try asking a question about this data. Let’s say I want to know what customer had the highest total revenue. Now, as I type in customer, you see that it underlines it, and that’s because it doesn’t know if I’m talking about the customer ID, which is one of my fields, or the customer name, which is also one of my fields. I want the customer name. I’ll select this option. And what’s neat is as I type that in, down below, you’ll see that Power BI already has an understanding of what all of my different customer names are. I’ll now continue entering my question. What customer name had the highest total revenue? And I’ll hit enter and right there I can see that it was Cascade Grovers with almost 2 million total revenue. And here too, we also see that revenue is underlined in blue. That’s because over here on the right-hand side, that is also one of my fields. What’s really neat is I can now modify this question. Maybe instead of highest, I want to know what was the lowest and there I could see was Acme Grocery Stores. Right away I see that answer. You could type in all sorts of queries. For example, show me customer name with total revenue as a table. And there I get a table of all of my customers and the revenue, but maybe instead of as a table, I would prefer maybe a pie chart and there I have a pie chart. Over to the right of the text field, let’s click on this settings gear and this opens up the Q&A setup. And with this, you can improve the Q&A results. For instance, you can provide synonyms. So maybe instead of having people type in customer name, maybe they want to type in client name and that too can work. Over to the right, you can review questions that people ask the Q&A, so maybe instead of having people ask questions, you can just build a permanent visual that answers that question. And down below you have some other tools to improve the quality of the results. Let’s close out of this. Down below, I really like this visual with a pie chart and revenue by customer. To keep this, right over here, I can click on this icon and this turns it into just the standard Power BI visual. This brings us to tip number two, my manager would like me to describe what’s happening in our business. Now I could dig through the data and try to make sense of it, or I could simply rely on AI. Up on the top tabs, make sure that you’re on the insert tab, And again, within the AI visuals category, there’s a visual called smart narrative. Let’s click on that. And here this inserts a summary of what’s been happening in our business. Here it says that the cookie shipped trended up almost 50% between January, 2020 and December, 2022. And if I look at this, that looks just about right. And here I have some additional analysis. This is a really good start. I could go through it and make some tweaks if I need to, but this really helps me make sense of my data. This brings us to tip number three, you can gain access to all of the latest functionality. Up in the top left-hand corner, let’s click on the file menu and then go down to options and settings, and then click into options. This opens up all of the different options. Over on the left-hand side, let’s click on preview features, and here you can see all of the different features that the Power BI team is working on. If you’d like to learn more about any one of them, you could simply click on this text right here. If you would like to turn on this feature or this functionality, simply check this box and then click on okay. Tip number four, you can add additional analysis to your visuals to help you make sense of them. Over here, I have a visual that shows me cookies shipped over time. I can click on this visual and over on the right-hand side in visualizations, I’ll click on this icon to add further analysis. And here we see all these different ways that I could further analyze this data. For instance, I can add a trend line and look at that, the cookie business always up into the right. That’s what we love to see. Right here, you could also add things like a min line, a max line, average, median, percentiles. And one of my favorites, you can also forecast forward. When I turn this on here, I see the upper bound of the forecast and also the lower bound and what’s expected. Not bad. I’ll turn that off. And right here, you could also find anomalies in your data. When I expand this, you have some additional settings. Let’s try changing the sensitivity to let’s say 80%. And here I see what’s expected, and I see that a few months were below the expectations. It looks like April was a bad month. Now what’s neat is I can click on this anomaly and over here, I get a description of what happened. So, it was unexpectedly low, but it doesn’t have a possible explanation. I’ll have to dig into that to see if I can make sense of what happened there. Tip number five, you can get your own custom visuals for your report. Over on the right-hand side, Power BI comes with many different visuals, but you may not find exactly what you’re looking for. In the bottom right-hand corner, let’s click on the meatball menu and then click on get more visuals. This opens up a view with hundreds of additional visuals that you can pull into your report. For instance, a few examples, you could have a timeline slicer. You can make a Gantt chart. Here’s a word cloud and the options go on and on. Just as an example, I want to pull in this one called the text filter. I’ll click on that and then here I’ll click on add. Here I see that the import was successful and here I see my new visual. Right now, this visual will only show up for this specific report. However, if I would like to have it in the future on other reports, here I can right click on it and then I can pin this to my visualizations pane and there it is. I can simply click on that and that now adds my new visual. Let’s pull in the customer name into here and check this out. I can now simply type in a customer name and that’ll filter all of my data based on that customer name. That’s just one example of a custom visual that you can pull in. Tip number six, there are several different ways that you can filter data in Power BI. Over on the left-hand side, I had this pie chart with the revenue for all of my customers and here I see all of my customer names. To filter to just one of these customers, I simply click on the customer name and that updates the visual to that customer and it also updates the other visuals. To view, let’s say two customers at once, I simply press the control key and I can select multiple customers. To go back to the default, I simply click out and that restores it to all of my customers. I’ll click out of this visual. Over on the right-hand side, I have a field for customer name. I’ll select that and that inserts a table. Just like with the pie chart, here I can also click on customer names and that too also filters the data to that customer. I’ll click out, and that again restores it to all of the different customers. With this visual selected, here I could also switch it to a slicer and this works the same way as a table. Here I can check these boxes. I could press control to multi-select and that again filters my data to those customers. One of the neat things about using a slicer, here if I click into format your visual, I’ll expand slicer settings. I can select a vertical list. We could go with a tile view and then I could filter this way, or we could even select a dropdown list, and here too, I can also filter based on my customers. So many different ways to filter. I’ll remove this dropdown. I’ll click on this more options and then remove. I can also apply a filter to this entire page and even multiple pages. I’ll expand the filters pane and here I can pull the customer name onto filters on this page. And let’s say I want to filter this page by Acme Grocery Stores. I’ll select that and there it filters all the data. Down below, I can also apply it to all pages. With the filter set here, I can set it so none of my viewers can come in and modify these filters. Up above, I can click on this eye icon and that way report viewers won’t be able to change this filtering. And once I publish, this filtering will be locked in place. Tip number seven, you can make your report available within Microsoft Teams. First, you’ll need to make sure that you publish your report. In the top right-hand corner, let’s click on publish and here you can choose your destination. I’ll place it in my workspace. And there it’s been successfully published. I’ll click on got it. In Microsoft Teams, I would like to place it in the Senior Leadership Team general channel. Up on top, I’ll click on the plus icon to add a new tab. Here you can search for Power BI. I’ll click on it right down here. Next, let’s click on save. Here you can add a link to your Power BI report or alternatively, you can browse the workspaces. I’ll go to my workspace and then select my new report KCC new and then click on add. And check that out, I now have a new tab with this Power BI report, and the really neat thing is I can interact with this report. Here I could filter by customer. So, I get the full functionality directly within a tab in Microsoft Teams. Tip number eight, Power Query includes some tools that help you check the quality of your data before importing it into your data model. Up on the home tab, let’s click on transform data. This opens up the Power Query editor and to check the quality of your data, you could simply scroll through the rows or you could look through the columns to make sure that everything makes sense. Power Query also helps you with this. Underneath the column header, you have this green line, and when I hover over that, here it tells me that all of my data is valid. It tells me that there are no empty rows, but if there were some issues in the data, I can click on this context menu, and here I have different options to help me clean up my data. Up on top, we can also click into the view tab, and here we have different ways that we can preview the data. For instance, instead of hovering over each column to check the quality, here I could toggle this on and I can check the quality across all of my columns just at once. You also have some additional information. I could turn on column distribution. Here I could see information about my different columns, like how many distinct or unique values appear in that column. And you could even pull up some summary statistics. Here I’ll check this box and let me select my order ID column. And down below, I see all of my different statistics and the distribution across all of those different items. This will help you quickly analyze if you have quality data. Number nine, you can make it really easy for others to access your report. Here, I’ve published my report to the Power BI web service. In the top left-hand corner, I’ll click on the file menu and here there’s an option to generate a QR code. Others can scan this code with their phone and that will bring them directly to this report as long as they already have access. Tip number 10, you can publish your Power BI report directly to PowerPoint. Up on top, I’ll click on the export menu and here we have the option for PowerPoint. You can embed an image, which will just take a static shot of what you see in this report and place it into PowerPoint. But what’s even cooler is you can embed live data. Let’s click on this. And right here, we can copy this report page link. Let’s copy this. Here I am now in PowerPoint. I’ll go up to the insert tab and right here in the middle, there’s the option for Power BI. When I click on that, I can paste my URL and then click on insert, and just like that, that inserts the report directly onto my slide and this is live data, meaning that it’s interactive. Here, I could filter by customer and it automatically updates the data. That is such a compelling way to present accurate and up to date information. Tip number 11, you can create a dashboard with all of the most important metrics for your organization. Here, I have a report that I just published to the Power BI web service. And in the top right-hand corner, I have our revenue for the last month. Our management loves seeing this metric. So, I want to make sure that it’s on a dashboard. I’ll click on this icon right here to pin this visual. Here, I have the option to pin it to a dashboard. I’ll select an existing dashboard and then click on pin. And here I’ll go to the dashboard. I can now see last month’s revenue. The nice thing about a dashboard is you can show metrics from a variety of different reports all in one place. Tip number 12, with a dashboard, you can also set alerts on various metrics. Here, for instance, I can click on this context menu, and here there’s the option to manage alerts. This opens up a pane on the right-hand side and I can add an alert rule. So here it says last month’s revenue. Maybe if it drops below, let’s say 100,000, that would be pretty devastating for our business. Here, I could select how often I want it to notify me and I could also decide if I wanted to send an email as well. Now, when I save and close, anytime the revenue drops, I’ll be alerted to that drop. To manage all of my alerts, I’ll click on this context menu, click on manage alerts, and here I see all the different alerts that I’ve created. Down at the very bottom, you can also use Power Automate to trigger additional actions. This is beyond the scope of the video today, but let’s say, for example, that you wanted it to send out a message to Microsoft Teams and send an email, you can use Power Automate to do that. Tip number 13 and another benefit of dashboards. You can also subscribe people to the dashboard. Up on top, I’ll click on subscribe to dashboard. This opens up a pane on the right-hand side and I can add a new subscription. Here, I could give it a name. I could type in email addresses. Currently, it just has mine. But let me type in my manager as well. I’ll type in Patty Fernandez. Here, I could also select the frequency of how often it’ll send this dashboard out and also what time I want it to go out at. This way, I can keep my organization informed on what’s going on with our business. This brings us to tip number 14, and this is the very last tip of the day. To be honest, this report looks just a little bit bland. Without any of the visuals selected, over on the right-hand side, under visualizations, I’ll click on format your report page and we can change this. Right here, I can modify the canvas background. The canvas is the area contained within this dotted line. Or we could also change the wallpaper, which is everything on this page, even beyond the dotted line. Right down here, I can browse for an image. I’ll select this one of the cookies. It’s now inserted this image. I can adjust the fit. Here I could fit it or we could also fill it. I’ll go with fit and that’s looking a lot better. It’ll make me hungry every time I look at this report. All right, well, let me know down below in the comments, do you have any other tips and tricks that you recommend. To watch more videos like this one, please consider subscribing and I’ll see you in the next video.