Enabling Copilot in Power BI: End to End Overview

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Copilot in Power BI enhances report creation and data analysis by suggesting relevant topics and generating report outlines based on your data. It assists in building report pages by identifying key tables, fields, and charts, and allows for easy customization. Additionally, Copilot improves data insights by leveraging your semantic model to answer queries and explore data. It also simplifies DAX formulation by generating queries based on user prompts, streamlining complex analytics tasks.

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Prerequisites for enabling Copilot in Power BI:

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Licensing Criteria

- Required Capacity: A licensed Fabric capacity (F64 or above) or a Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or greater) is necessary.

 Administrator Activation

- Admin Enablement: Your system administrator must activate Copilot within Microsoft Fabric.

Geographic Tenant Restrictions

- Default Configuration: By default, Copilot is not activated for tenants or capacities located outside the United States or France.

- Activating Copilot: With administrator approval, data transmitted to Azure OpenAI can be processed beyond the predefined regions, thus enabling Copilot.

Exclusion of Trial SKUs

- Unsupported SKUs: Only licensed SKUs (F64 or higher, or P1 or greater) are compatible; trial SKUs are not supported.

Q&A Functionality

- Q&A Requirement: The Q&A feature must be activated within the semantic model’s dataset settings for Copilot to function.

Access Permissions

- Workspace Access: 

  - At a minimum, you need Read access to the workspace or appropriate permissions to the app to generate insights.

  - Write access to the workspace or app permissions is required to create insights and reports.

Copilot Part of Fabric Tenancy Region

• Microsoft Fabric is available in the Azure availability regions.
• If your home region isn’t listed, you can still utilize it by setting up a Fabric capacity in a region where it is available.

Using Copilot in Power BI Desktop

• Accessing Copilot:

• Open a Power BI report and select Copilot from the ribbon.
• Choose a Copilot-compatible workspace.
• Use the Settings gear to switch the associated workspace.

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• Key Features:

• Automatic Report Suggestions: Generate report ideas based on your data.
• One-Click Report Creation: Quickly create reports with a single click.
• Automated Narrative Summaries: Receive narrative summaries of your data.
• DAX Queries: Write and get explanations for DAX queries.
• Interactive Q&A: Ask questions about your data model.
• Measure Descriptions: Automatically create descriptions for measures (Preview as of July 2024).

Using Copilot in Power BI Service

• Accessing Copilot:

• Go to the Data Hub and select "More options" for the dataset you want to explore.
• Choose "Suggest content for this report" to see Copilot's recommendations.
• Select "Create" to start generating report pages with Copilot's assistance.

• Key Features:

• Report Summarization: Generate a summary of your report directly in the Copilot pane.
• Visual Summarization: Summarize the visuals on a specific page.
• Semantic Model Summarization: Provide summaries of the underlying data model.
• Content Suggestions: Receive suggestions for additional content in your report.
• Interactive Q&A: Ask questions like "sales performance by product" or "customer segmentation."

Key Considerations for Effective Copilot Enablement

 Part of Data Lakehouse

- Unified solution combining data lakes and data warehouses

- Provides agility, scalability, structured analytics, and real-time performance

 Table Linking

- Define and clearly state all relationships between tables

  - One-to-many

  - Many-to-one

  - Many-to-many

- Ensure logical and accurate relationship types

 Hierarchies – Logical Grouping

- Establish clear hierarchies for dimension tables

- Facilitate drill-down in reports

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Column Names – Data Types

- Use unambiguous and self-explanatory column names

- Apply correct and consistent data types across all tables

 Security

- Define security roles for different levels of data access

- Protect sensitive elements from unauthorized users

 Measures

- Standardize and clarify calculation logic for measures

- Use clear naming conventions reflecting calculations and purposes

Fact Tables

- Clearly define fact tables containing measurable, quantitative data

Dimension Tables

- Define dimension tables with descriptive attributes related to fact tables

- Examples: "Customer_Information", "Product_Details"

Copilot Security

- Data Control and Privacy

  - Azure OpenAI Service managed by Microsoft secured by enterprise grade security.

  - Data is not used for model training or shared with other customers

- Data Processing Control

  - Data processing within Fabric remains in your tenant’s geographic region

  - Option to permit data processing outside your region lies with customer

- Data Retention Policy

  NO data not even related to prompt is retained. 

Copilot Constraints

 Limitations of an On-Premise Solution with Copilot

- Semantic Models with Implicit Measures Disabled

  - Copilot cannot create report pages if implicit measures are disabled in your semantic model.

- Visual Modifications

  - Copilot cannot modify visuals after generation.

- Filters and Slicers

  - Copilot cannot add filters or set slicers based on prompt specifications (e.g., interpreting "30 days" as a date filter).

- Complex Intent

  - Copilot struggles with understanding and processing complex prompts (e.g., multi-dimensional reports).

- Language and Data Limitations

  - Best performance is in English; other languages may have lower performance.

  - Extensive data points may lead to truncated responses.

- Accuracy and Preview Limitations

  - Accuracy may be limited in the public preview.

  - Copilot summary pane does not return new visuals as data answers; Data Q&A capabilities require enabling the preview switch.

Have you tried Copilot in Power BI? Share your experiences in the comments below! If you found this article helpful, don’t forget to give it a clap and share it with your network.

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