Q&A visual allows users to ask questions about their data using natural language and instantly receive answers in the form of appropriate visualizations. Powered by natural language processing (NLP), it understands user queries and automatically generates the most suitable visual based on the available data.
Note: This lesson demonstrates the Q&A visual, which Microsoft has announced will be retired in December 2026. In recent versions of Power BI Desktop, the Q&A visual may no longer appear in the Visualizations pane by default. Existing reports that use the Q&A visual will continue to work during the transition period. Microsoft recommends using Copilot for Power BI for future AI-powered natural language data exploration.
How to Proceed?
Step 1
Launch power BI desktop app and open the new report page and import the data required.
Step 2
In “Visualizations” pane click on “Q and A” which is highlighted in the given figure
Note: In recent versions of Power BI Desktop, the Q&A visual may not appear in the Visualizations pane by default because it has been deprecated. If available, select Q&A from the Visualizations pane to create the visual.
Step 3
Main advantage of Q and A visual is that it can understand complete sentences or shorter phrases too. It can give suggestions based on the data which makes easier for us to phrase questions.
When we type question, the fields get recognized by power BI and field will be underlined in blue color and unrecognized words will be underlined in red
Type question in the “Ask a question about your data” box, it will show some suggestions by default, or you can pick from pre prepared questions. Click on more suggestions option at the bottom to get more questions.
Here I choose pre prepared question from the list of suggestion. By default, Q and A visual shows best suited visual for the question asked about data. If you want specific chart type to add “as” along with the end of the question followed by chart type.
Tip: You can ask follow-up questions or refine your existing question to further explore the data. The Q&A visual automatically updates the visualization based on your revised query.
Step 4
Creating standard visual from Q and A visual
We can convert the Q and A visual to a standard visual by click on the icon on the top right corner. Once the visual get converted to a standard visual you can make required visual settings to the chart.
Step 5: Setup the Q and A visual
Click on the settings icon to set up questions.
Click on the suggest questions and frame questions. click add and save.
Add synonyms
Adding synonyms helps power BI recognize the words related to field. For E.g., region can also be asked as countries, we can add or remove related terms for a field.
By default, power BI shows synonyms suggestions based on the words used.
Teach Q and A
Type questions in plain English and click submit.
Step 6 Save the visual
Finally, your Q&A visual is ready. Save the Power BI report to preserve the visual and its formatting.
When to use Q and A visual?
When we want to produce insights quickly, we can go for Q and A visual and also it can be used to give answers in real time when we ask questions.
Pros
- Enables users to interact with data
- User friendly
- Automatically create visualizations which saves time and effort.
- Quick and intuitive data exploration
Cons
- Limited Customization
- May have performance issues when converting complex queries to visualizations.
- We have to setup proper synonyms to get visuals correctly.
Conclusion
The Q&A visual has been a powerful feature for enabling natural language data exploration in Power BI. Although it remains available for existing reports during the transition period, Microsoft has announced that it will be retired in December 2026. Going forward, Copilot for Power BI is the recommended AI-powered solution for exploring data and generating insights using natural language.
Useful Information
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