Similarly this sentence is being interpreted to count the number of distinct athletes that won medals at the last London Olympics.īeyond being able to ask for a count of medalists, you can ask a number of interesting questions with Q&A that provide far deeper insights. “Show the total number of medalists at the London 2012 games” Let’s try that with the 2012 London Olympics. It’s nice to get a list of medalists but maybe you want to total number of medalists in a given summer Olympics. Q&A interprets the search query and displays the corresponding information from the workbook to create a list of athletes that participated at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. In this example, the Excel workbook with data about summer Olympics has been saved to Office 365. If you are already registered, log on, enable the sample spreadsheets, and try it out for yourself.įirst, let’s find all the medalists that participated in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics: You can try these out for yourself if you head over to and register for the preview.
#Ms outlook search query series#
Let’s introduce Q&A’s through a series of examples using these 2 datasets. In this preview release Q&A is configured to work over two sample Excel models: one pertaining to summer Olympics medalists between 18 and another containing retail bar sales. Q&A builds upon Microsoft’s first in class Business Intelligence platform and allows the use of natural language to discover, understand, and report over your own datasets. Q&A is a natural language based experience for interacting with data as part of the Power BI for Office 365 offering. A couple of days ago we posted “ Microsoft Updates Power BI for Office 365 Preview” and announced the addition of significant new features to the Power BI for Office 365 Preview including natural language search with Q&A, and improved experiences in two preview add-ins for Excel with 3D mapping visualizations through Power Map and improved data search in Power Query. In order to do that, you need tools that help you visualize the data sets you use. It doesn’t matter if your company is big or small, you need to be able to spot trends and capitalize on opportunities.