Copilot for Power BI: Two Ways to Get Answers Faster

If you have ever opened a report somebody else built and spent twenty minutes trying to work out what it is actually telling you, Copilot for Power BI is aimed squarely at you. It is not a magic button that builds your data model. It is a reading and drafting assistant that sits on top of the model you already have.

I see the same thing in class every month. Somebody inherits a report from a colleague who left. Nine pages, forty visuals, no documentation, and the director wants a one-paragraph headline by Thursday. The report is fine — nobody has time to sit and interpret it.

Two things are worth doing this week. The first takes ten minutes and gives you a usable draft summary. The second takes half an hour and is the reason some people get great answers out of Copilot while others get nonsense.

Use Copilot for Power BI to summarize a report page in plain English

In Power BI Desktop, the Copilot button sits on the Home ribbon, on the right-hand side. In the Power BI Service (the browser version), open the report and look for Copilot in the top menu bar. Either one opens a pane down the right side of the screen.

Here is where most people stop, so let me get it out of the way: if you do not see the button, you are almost certainly not missing a setting on your PC. Copilot in Power BI runs on Fabric capacity F2 or higher (or a legacy P SKU), and your tenant administrator has to have the Copilot switch turned on. A Pro license alone will not show you the button.

Assuming you have it, do not type Summarize this page. You will get a flat, generic recap. Be specific about the audience and what you want called out:

• Summarize this page for a sales director. Call out the three biggest movers versus last month and say whether each trend is up or down.
• What two things on this page most need explaining to someone new to this report?
• Write three bullet points about regional performance this quarter that I can paste into an email.

What comes back is a few paragraphs of narrative tied to the actual numbers in the visuals on that page. You can paste it straight into an email, or drop it into the report itself using the Smart narrative visual so it refreshes along with the data.

The gotcha: Copilot only reads the semantic model and the visuals on the page you are looking at. It has no idea March was low because your biggest customer pushed an order into April, and it will draw the wrong conclusion confidently. Treat every summary as a first draft from a bright intern who has never met your business — read it, correct it, then send it.

Fix your field names before you blame Copilot

This is the part nobody wants to hear, and it is the single biggest thing separating good answers from bad ones. Copilot reads your model’s field names and descriptions the way a new employee would. If your columns are called CUST_NM_1 and AMT_2, you are going to get garbage.

Spend thirty minutes doing this in Power BI Desktop:

• Go to Model view, click a column, and open the Properties pane. Rename it to what a human would call it — Customer Name, not CUST_NM_1.
• Fill in the Description box while you are there. Copilot reads it. One sentence like “Net revenue after discounts, excluding tax” prevents a lot of wrong answers.
• Right-click every technical key and staging column and choose Hide in report view. Copilot ignores hidden fields, which is exactly what you want for RowID and ETL_Load_Date.
• Select your calendar table, then Table tools > Mark as date table. Without this, time questions like “last 12 months” are unreliable.
• For geography columns, set the Data category to City, State or Country so that map questions actually work.

Then go back and ask something real, like Show total revenue by customer name for the last 12 months as a bar chart, top 10 only. Copilot will build the visual for you on a new page, and you can keep it or throw it away.

The gotcha: hiding is a blunt instrument. Hide the junk, but not something you may want to ask about later — Copilot behaves as though it does not exist. And where you have a choice, build a proper measure rather than a calculated column; measures respond correctly when Copilot slices the data an unexpected way.

Plenty more on the calendar

I am running a live session on exactly this — Overview of Copilot for Power BI — on Tuesday, September 22. We cover where the Copilot pane lives in Desktop and the Service, what the licensing requires, how to prepare a model so answers are trustworthy, and which questions work versus the ones that quietly fail.

The full current schedule is on the front page of PCWebinars.com, with new dates going up as they are confirmed. Register for this one, or have a browse and find something else that fits your week.

About your trainer

I’m Tom Fragale. I have been a computer trainer and consultant for more than 30 years, and I have taught well over 30,000 people how to get more out of the software they already own — Excel, Access, Power BI, Word, Outlook, and now the AI tools that sit on top of all of it: Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot. My background is applied, not theoretical. Alongside teaching, I build real databases and reporting systems for clients in Excel, Access, and Power BI, so the examples I use in class are the problems I ran into last week, not textbook exercises. I also publish free tutorials on YouTube and longer courses online.

If any of this was useful, there is a lot more of it — tutorials, recordings, and the live schedule — waiting for you at PCWebinars.com.