Adding a smart narrative visual – Creating Reports

Adding a smart narrative visual

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. That may be so, but sometimes you just might want some words to explain what is happening in your data. The smart narrative visualization will quickly summarize visuals and reports and put that summarization into text. It provides relevant innovative insights that you can customize.

Smart narrative summaries will build key takeaways and trends, and you can edit the language and format so the insights can be tailored to a specific audience. With smart narrative visuals, your report users will better understand the data, arrive at key points faster, and be able to explain the insights to others.

There are two different ways to generate a smart narrative summary. The first is to right-click on a visual in Power BI Desktop and select Summarize from the context menu. This will create a new smart narrative visualization.

Figure 9.33 – Smart narrative visual

If you have many visualizations on the page and you want a summary of all the data, you can select the smart narrative visualization from the Visualizations pane and it will generate a summary of all the visualizations on the page.

Figure 9.34 – Smart narrative visual summarizing all visuals on the page

You can edit the resulting text, adding text and configuring the formatting or any other text option you want. You can also add your own insights dynamically by adding your own values or calculations.

Figure 9.35 – Editing the smart narrative text

The smart narrative visualization will react to cross-filtering. For example, if you highlight Helicopter in the stacked column chart, the smart narrative will rerun, filtering for Helicopter.

Figure 9.36 – Smart narrative visual reacting to cross-filtering

We’ll now check out how we can configure the report page so that we can customize it.