Are You Smarter Than Power BI?

This past weekend at SharePoint Saturday Conference in Columbus, OH, we decided to do something a little different for our lunch session. Instead of the normal, boring, death-by-PowerPoint vendor demonstration, we decided to do something fun and host a game show called "Are You Smarter Thank Power BI?".

To do this, we leveraged Power BI's Q&A feature.  Power BI's Q&A uses natural language queries to find answers in your own data. Power BI Q&A presents your answers in the form of visualizations. As you type a question, Power BI Q&A picks the best visual to display your answer; and the visual changes dynamically as you modify the question.  The experience is truly interactive…and fast! Powered by an in-memory storage, response is almost instantaneous.

Since the conference was being held in the Fawcett Center on The Ohio State University campus, we decided to base the game around knowledge of The Ohio State University football.  Essentially, we created a data set of OSU football seasons (see below). Then we added a few calculated fields and synonyms and came up with a list of questions. Participants received an extra entry in a drawing for a Microsoft Band for each correct answer. Below is how we built the data for the game, the questions we asked and Power BI's answers.

The initial data for the game consisted of the following fields as shown below, along with a row of sample data:

Season Wins Losses Ties   Coach                  Conference     Bowl Game
2014     14       1           0        Urban Meyer    Big Ten             Sugar Bowl

To this I added two calculated fields:

Games =[Wins]+[Losses]+[Ties]

wp = [Wins]/[Games]

Finally, I add some synonyms like "led" and "leader" for "Coach" and "winning percentage" for "wp". Here are the questions we asked and the answers we received from Power BI.

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3 

  Question 4

 Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

Question 8

Question 9

 Question 10

We had a lot of fun with this and it was a great SharePoint Saturday event overall!

If you would like to try this yourself, here is the data I used.