I have known for a while that setting the Data Category property on a column can influence the results you get from Power BI Copilot but I have struggled to find a scenario where it actually makes a noticeable difference. My sources on the Power BI Copilot team told me that Copilot does consider geographic categories (which are exposed in the Power BI Desktop UI) and date categories (which are available to set in tools like Tabular Editor but aren’t exposed in the Power BI Desktop UI; the full list of categories is documented here) but it’s only one factor among many. However, when writing my last blog post, I finally found a good example to show you all.
In my last blog post I showed how setting the Sort By Column property on the Launch column in this table:
…means that the following Copilot prompt:
Show Sales Amount by launch…returns a column chart showing sales by launch year sorted by year in ascending order:
The fact that the column on the x axis is called just “Launch” and doesn’t mention anything about financial years, and that the contents of the column are text and not integers, means that Copilot doesn’t know that the contents of the column are financial years.
However, opening the model in Tabular Editor and setting the Data Category property on the Launch column to “Years”:
…means the same prompt now returns a line chart rather than a column chart:
[Interestingly this doesn’t happen if you set the Data Category to “FiscalYears”]
Although I’ve seen the behaviour change over the last few months, I think it’s the case that setting the Data Category property to one of the geography-related values can influence whether data is displayed using a map visual or not in some cases.