Create smart narrative summaries (preview)

• 11/06/2020
• 4 minutes to read
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The smart narrative visualization helps you quickly summarize visuals and reports. It provides relevant innovative insights that you can customize.

Use smart narrative summaries in your reports to address key takeaways, to point out trends, and to edit the language and format for a specific audience. In PowerPoint, instead of pasting a screenshot of your report's key takeaways, you can add narratives that are updated with every refresh. Your audience can use the summaries to understand the data, get to key points faster, and explain the data to others.

Get started

Watch Justyna show you how to use smart narratives, then try it out yourself using the tutorial, below the video. To follow along with this tutorial, download the sample file of an online-sales scenario.

In the Visualizations pane, select the Smart narrative icon to automatically generate a summary.

You see a narrative that's based on all of the visuals on the page. For example, in the sample file, smart narratives can automatically generate a summary of the report's visuals that address revenue, website visits, and sales. Power BI automatically analyzes trends to show that revenue and visits have both grown. It even calculates growth, which in this case is 72 percent.

To generate a smart narrative of a visualization, right-click it and then select Summarize. For example, in the sample file, try summarizing a scatter chart that shows various transactions. Power BI analyzes the data and shows which city or region has the highest revenue per transaction and the highest number of transactions. The smart narrative also shows the expected range of values for these metrics. You see that most cities produce less than $45 per transaction and have fewer than 10 transactions.

Edit the summary

The smart narrative summary is highly customizable. You can edit or add to the existing text by using the text box commands. For example, you can make the text bold or change its color.

To customize the summary or add your own insights, use dynamic values. You can map text to existing fields and measures or use natural language to define a new measure to map to text. For example, to add information about the number of returned items in the sample file, add a value.

As you type a value name, you can choose from a list of suggestions as you do in a Q&A visual. So, in addition to asking questions of your data in a Q&A visual, you can now create your own calculations without even using Data Analysis Expressions (DAX).

You can also format dynamic values. For example, in the sample file, you can show values as currency, specify decimal places, and choose a separator for thousands.

To format a dynamic value, select the value in the summary to see your editing options on the Review tab. Or in the text box, next to the value that you want to edit, select the edit button.

You can also use the Review tab to review, delete, or reuse previously defined values. Select the plus sign (+) to insert the value into the summary. You can also show automatically generated values by turning on the option at the bottom of the Review tab.

Sometimes a hidden-summary symbol appears in the smart narrative. It indicates that current data and filters produce no result for the value. A summary is empty when no insights are available. For example, in the sample file's line chart, a summary of high and low values might be empty when the chart's line is flat. But the summary might appear under other conditions. Hidden-summary symbols are visible only when you try to edit a summary.

Visual interactions

A summary is dynamic. It automatically updates the generated text and dynamic values when you cross-filter. For example, if you select electronics products in the sample file's donut chart, the rest of the report is cross-filtered, and the summary is also cross-filtered to focus on the electronics products.

In this case, the visits and revenues have different trends, so the summary text is updated to reflect the trends. The count-of-returns value that we added is updated to $4196. Empty summaries can be updated when you cross-filter.

You can also do more advanced filtering. For example, in the sample file, look at the visual of trends for multiple products. If you're interested only in a trend for a certain quarter, then select the relevant data points to update the summary for that trend.

Limitations

The smart narrative feature doesn't support the following functionality:

• Pinning to a dashboard
• Using dynamic values and conditional formatting (for example, data bound title)
• Azure Analysis Services, on-premises AS
• KPIs, cards, multiple-row cards, maps, tables, matrices, R visuals or Python visuals, custom visuals
• Summaries of visuals whose columns are grouped by other columns and for visuals that are built on a data group field 
• Cross-filtering out of a visual
• Renaming dynamic values or editing automatically generated dynamic values
• Summaries of visuals that contain on-the-fly calculations like QnA arithmetic and percentage of grand total
• Calculation groups