I’d like to thank you all for attending the webinar held on 30th September 2016. I talked about some amazing under cover aspects of Power BI Desktop model. In this session you learnt:
Another cool feature is adding Synonyms to the model. Power BI Synonyms can significantly improve the Q&A and query experience. With synonyms we can now add some other forms of names for our tables, columns and measures in Power BI Desktop model which makes using Q&A even easier for our customers to find what they are looking for. The customers don’t know all table, column or measure names. Defining common separate list of names for tables, columns or measures makes Q&A much more useful.
For instance, we can add the following synonyms:
Note:The following tables and columns are from AdventureWorksDW.
Original Name
Object Type
Synonym
FactInternetSales
Table
Internet Sales, InternetSales
OrderQuantity
Column
Order Quantity, Order Qty, ord qty
SalesAmount
Column
Sales Amount, Sales Amt, Internet Sales Amount, Internet Sales Amt
TaxAmt
Column
Tax Amount, Tax Amt
Freight
Column
freight
OrderDate
Column
order date
How it works
It’s easy to setup synonyms in Power BI Desktop. Switch to relationship view then click “Synonyms” from “Modeling” tab from the ribbon. Then simply enter the synonyms.
After we publish a Power BI Desktop model to Power BI Service, the synonyms will play a great role in Q&A so that when the customer types “ord qty” the Q&A engine will recognise it as “OrderQuantity” and displays the results. It’s really cool isn’t it?
But, let’s think a little bit out of the box. What if we add some translations as synonyms? Hmm. I think it would be really great that a Spanish customer can type Spanish column names in Q&A rather than English. I added some translations to FactInternetSales columns and DimDate columns.
Thanks to Google translate for French and Spanish translations. Sorry French and Spanish guys if the translation looks funny.
Now I publish the model to Power BI Service. To do so, just click on “Publish” from “Home” tab from the ribbon.
I’d like to thank you all for attending the webinar held on 30th September 2016. I talked about some amazing under cover aspects of Power BI Desktop model. In this session you learnt:
