1. Customize a report with Q&A
Part of designing a great report is anticipating what your users need and providing it to them. Sometimes, however, you might want to give users more control over what they see. That's where the Q&A visual comes in.
2. Q&A Capabilities
The Q&A visual allows users to input questions as queries and view the resulting data. It currently works in production with English but other languages are forthcoming.
Q&A provides auto-complete capabilities and spell-checking to make it easier to enter valid queries.
You can also preview the answer to make sure that it understands your intent.
Even with its built-in intelligence, the Q&A visual will have language limitations. If there is a word the Q&A visual does not understand, it will highlight the word for you.
3. How it works
To use the Q&A visual, enter the name of the column or measure you want to see.
You can filter or group using a variety of prepositions, but all prepositions behave the same. You can use a single preposition like "by" if you'd like or you use different prepositions if you prefer--the result will be the same.
As an example query, we want to get the actual amount for each cost center for each date. We use two separate prepositional phrases here but the intent is the same for each.
The Q&A visual uses natural language processing to read and interpret the text and then display the data using what it considers the most proper visual.
4. Requesting a specific visual
Sometimes, however, you may not like the visual it chooses. In that case, you may specify a visual. For example, you might prefer to see the data as a table, a treemap, or a ribbon chart.
One critical note is that you will have limited control over these visuals. You may specify something as a ribbon chart but the Q&A visual then decides whether a particular column is part of the axis or part of the legend. With more complex queries, it may be difficult to get the exact result you desire.
For fine tuning, you might decide to convert the Q&A visual into the actual visual itself. Once you do that, it will give you the ability to edit the visual directly.
5. Synonyms
Synonyms allow you to have multiple words to represent the same column.
The Q&A setup page will automatically suggest terms but you can also add your own custom names.
Once you create synonyms, the Q&A visual treats these like they were actual column names.
Because of this, watch out not to use the same synonym for multiple columns as then the Q&A visual will not be able to determine which you really meant to use.
6. Managing terms with Teach Q&A
You may also define your own terms, either nouns or adjectives. Nouns refer to specific fields and may include filters on the data. Adjectives, meanwhile, act as ways to filter the data. These terms allow you to incorporate business jargon: terminology which your users understand but the general public might not. As a quick note, verbs like "allocated" cannot be defined, so don't use verbs in your queries.
7. Make Q&A work better
To make the Q&A engine work better for users, name your columns and measures in a way which makes sense for users, including complete names in natural language. Don't use cryptic symbols.
Create terms and synonyms to make life easier, especially when different business units refer to the same thing with different names.
Finally, you can make life easier for users by providing sample questions, giving them an idea of what types of queries they can ask.
8. Let's practice!
Now that we've covered the basics of the Q&A visual, let's dive further into the topic.