Forum Discussion
How to use filter in Q&A
Community ChampionMabelle Not exactly sure what you mean but please see screenshot of below using one of my datasets where I just type in 'JU' for month and it comes back with both months that starts with JU.
Well, the problem is the following:
I have a column named Item Name. Let´s say it has entries "Office 2003", "Office 2007", "Office 2013".
Now this column is also a report filter and I can go to filter and then advanced filter and choose "contains" and type "Office". Then those three entries are displayed.
But when I go to Q&A and type
"'Reportname' Item Name contains Office"
it doesn´t work.
Normally I can type the report name and then the whole report is displayed and then I can say "SKU ...." which shows the report only for this special SKU.
- orionlee
Microsoft Employee
Q&A only supports a subset of the filter functionality available in PowerBI. If you're matching exact values in your filter you can use the suggestion from wonga to specify the filter by typing "... where ... is ...". However if you have an example such as yours where you need to perform a contains because you want to match the "Office" filter with entries "Office 2003", "Office 2007" etc. you can specify the "Contains" filter via the Visualizations pane on the right hand side.
If you're really keen to type a "contains" filter directly into the Q&A textbox so that you can avoid having to use the Filter Card UI in the Visualizations pane, please vote for the idea here:
https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/10943064-unstructured-text-search-analysis-in-q-a 
wongaContinued Contributor
You can try using keywords like "where" and "is" to specify a filter. So I guess in your case it would something like:
"Number of items where itemname is Office"
