Smart Narratives

Smart narratives are textual summaries or data-driven storytellers of any report or group of charts for easy analysis of some data trends. It’s based on all of the visuals on the page.

• It gives a quick text summary of visuals and export.
• It also gives innovative customizable insights.
• It addresses key takeaways and provides data trends, and invisible insights formatting for a specific type of audience.
• It gets refreshed with every update and access.

When to use Smart Narratives

• To customize the text summary by adding the user’s own insights with dynamic values.
• Smart narratives are outcomes of AI that can map text to some fields
• To use natural language to define a new measure for a text-based summary.
• To add textual easy to read and understand information to any data or report.
• To add calculations without using DAX.
• To show values as current, specify decimal places and include separators for big numbers like thousands.
• To use previously defined values and save them for regular usage.

Features

Some of the features ar eself explanatory from the above information

• A hidden-summary symbol appears indicating that current data and filters produce no result for the value. They are visible while editing some text summary. It gets updated after editing is done.
• A summary output is always empty when no data insights are available.
• A summary is dynamic which is automatically generated once the user corss filters any datapoint.
• Smart narrative provides advance filtering and can generate upto four summaries per visual and upto 16 per page. It automatically avoids repeated type of summaries for different visuals.

Pre-requisite

You can refer to Power BI interactive dashboards for easy implementation of the following charts. We have already seen so many articles for creating different type of charts. Here we will be showing examples of smart narratives on ready made visuals. For creation , refer to already existing articles of Power BI charts. Let us understand from the following steps.

DataSet used

The dataset used is “SaleData.xlsx“. Upload the dataset in Power BI and refer to the dataset to follow along with the below-given sections of the article.

A general idea about the fields or columns of the above dataset can be taken by having a look into it.

Load Data in the Desktop

Open Power BI Desktop

Click the “Get Data” option and select “Excel” for data source selection and extraction.

Select the relevant desired file from the folder for data load. In this case, the file is “SaleData.xls”. click the “Load” button once the preview is shown for the Excel data file.

The dashboard is seen once the file is loaded with the “Visualizations” Pane and “Data fields” Pane which stores the different variables of the data file. Drag the red-colored square box to the main canvas where you want to show smart narratives for any particular visual or report or page.

The “SaleData.xls” dataset which is used for creating some reports or charts look like the following.

In the “Visualizations” pane, we can select the chart type or group of charts needed for our visual representation of business data. They can be dragged for the “Report” view for further process. We have already seen many Power BI chart types and its implementations. Further we will be showing the use of smart narratives in any of the already existing report view.

In this article, we will learn to implement Smart Narratives using Power BI. This discusses some important concepts used to create the very common smart narratives so as to make large business intelligence decisions made out of analyzing data trends in the form of text which is easy to understand and narrate. We will be discussing the following topics and their implementation in the Power BI desktop.