Asking your dashboard a question

Once the dashboard is complete, you're able to ask questions of your data. Right above the dashboards' data, you'll see the area where you can Ask a question about your data.  For example, you can ask the question "Show me the total stores by state", and Power BI will typically produce a geography answer from that question. If you'd prefer to see your answer as a bar chart instead of a map, you can explicitly ask for it as a graph element—for example, "Show me the total stores by the state in a bar chart".

If you like the answer that comes back, you can click Pin Visual in the top-right corner to pin the report item to a dashboard. You can also expand the Filters and Visualizations on the right to be very precise with your report item. For example, you may only want to see stores with sales above a certain level. While Power BI is great at answering questions with filters, it sometimes needs fine tuning. If you're curious as to where Power BI pulled this data from, below your newly created report, you'll see the source of the data from which the report was derived.

A great way to encourage your users to utilize this feature is to seed Power BI with some sample questions. To do this, select the settings gear box on the upper-right corner of your screen. Once there, click the dataset that you wish to create sample questions for in the Datasets tab, as shown in the following screenshot. Expand the Featured Q&A Questions section, click Add a Question, and add several questions that might interest your user: 

Creating featured questions will help your users to start to use the vocabulary of the report. For example, your sales team may be used to calling someone a "client", but your marketing team uses the term "customer".  Featured questions will encourage all users to refer to customers as clients. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, you can create synonyms inside the Power BI desktop. You can do this in the modeling tab when looking at your relationships. You can also create more advanced linguistic models in the Power BI desktop by importing linguistic models. This can help with questions that you think users might ask, such as "Who is my best customer in New York?" or "Show me the worst employees by office." The linguistic model would translate what "best" and "worst" means to the company. 

One of the amazing features you can do inside of Power BI is to ask questions through Cortana, Windows's voice-operated assistant. With Cortana integration enabled in the Settings tab, your users will be able to ask questions in Windows without logging into Power BI, and can get quick answers right from the Start menu. To do this, the user must have their company account (typically Office 365) associated with Windows by going to Settings | Account in Windows. You must also connect Office 365 to Cortana as a connected service.