Power BI Q&A Visual: How to Ask Questions About Your Data (and What Replaces It)

A client asked me for a report where managers could just type a question, like “total sales by category”, and get a chart back without learning Power BI. The Q&A visual does exactly that: you ask in plain English, and Power BI picks the fields and the chart for you.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to turn Q&A on, add the visual, ask good questions, turn an answer into a normal visual and teach Q&A your own terms. First, though, there’s one important change you need to know about before you build anything new with it.

Quick answer: In Power BI Desktop, double-click an empty spot on the report canvas, or add the Q&A visual from the Visualizations pane, and type a question such as total sales by category. If the icon is missing, select More options (…) > Restore default visuals. Microsoft is retiring Q&A in February 2027 and recommends Copilot for Power BI instead.

Q&A is retiring in February 2027

Microsoft’s documentation now says that Q&A experiences are going away in February 2027, and it recommends Copilot for Power BI for asking questions about your data. Existing Q&A visuals keep working until then.

So my advice is simple: use Q&A in existing reports and for quick exploration in Desktop, but don’t make it the main feature of a new report. If your organization has Copilot, plan to move those users to it. To brush up on the basics first, see how to use Power BI Desktop.

Turn on Q&A in Power BI Desktop

Q&A is on by default. If it’s been turned off, select File > Options and settings > Options:

Under Current File, select Data Load and check Turn on Q&A to ask natural language questions about your data, then select OK:

Q&A works with imported data, live connections to Power BI semantic models and Analysis Services, and DirectQuery to Azure SQL, Azure Synapse and SQL Server 2019. It doesn’t work with Direct Lake models.

The parts of the Q&A visual

• Question box: where you type. Power BI suggests terms as you go.
• Suggestions: questions Power BI generates from your data, so people know where to start.
• Convert icon: turns the answer into a standard visual.
• Gear icon: opens Q&A setup, where you teach it your terms.

Add a Q&A visual

My report uses product sales data with a treemap, column chart, funnel and donut chart:

To add Q&A, double-click an empty part of the canvas, or select the Q&A icon in the Visualizations pane. The icon is hidden by default in current versions; if you can’t see it, select More options (…) at the end of the visuals list and choose Restore default visuals.

The new visual shows suggested questions based on your data:

Select a suggestion or type your own question. I chose show products and ship dates:

Power BI picks the chart type it thinks fits best, here a clustered bar chart. To choose the visual yourself, add it to the question, for example show products and ship dates as a table:

Ask a question in your own words

Type a question in the box, such as profit of printers by subcategory. Q&A underlines the words as you type:

• A solid blue underline means Q&A recognized the word.
• An orange dotted underline means it isn’t sure.
• A red double underline means it didn’t understand the word.

For a single number, Q&A answers with a card:

Add more to the question and the answer changes. Q&A suggests terms from your model, underlined in blue:

Q&A understands your model better when the tables and columns have clear names and the relationships are right. A proper date table helps a lot with questions about time; see how to create a date table in Power BI.

Turn the answer into a standard visual

When you like an answer, select the convert icon in the top right of the Q&A visual:

The answer becomes a normal visual that you can format, filter and cross-highlight like any other. It’s no longer a Q&A visual, so it keeps working after Q&A is retired. To polish it, see conditional formatting in Power BI.

Teach Q&A your terms

Select the gear icon to open Q&A setup:

• Teach Q&A: tell it what an unrecognized word means, for example that “revenue” means Sales Amount.
• Synonyms: add other names for fields, such as “client” for Customer.
• Suggest questions: choose the starter questions people see.
• Review questions: see what people asked in the published report over the last 28 days, and fix the ones that failed.

Q&A setup is only available in Power BI Desktop. Good field names help Copilot too, so this work isn’t wasted when you move to it. For measures that answer common questions, see these Power BI measure examples.

Limitations

• Not available in Power BI Report Server or Reporting Services.
• Direct Lake models and models with limited relationships aren’t supported.
• Row-level security is supported. Object-level security is supported for models hosted in the Power BI service, but not for Analysis Services.
• Composite models work if they include at least one import or supported DirectQuery source.
• The index covers text values under 100 characters, up to 5 million unique values and the first 1,000 entities.
• Teach Q&A can’t redefine a term it already recognizes, and it doesn’t support multiple conditions.

If Q&A can’t answer something, a regular visual usually can. For filters users can control, see Power BI filter vs slicer.

These Power BI tutorials will help you build the report around it:

• Create a Matrix Visual in Power BI
• Power Query vs Power BI: What’s the Difference and How They Work Together
• Power BI MAX and MIN function with Examples
• Power BI Measure Filter

Frequently Asked Questions