Power BI Blog: Sharing Q&A Synonyms

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Power BI blog series. This week, we discuss sharing Q&A synonyms with the latest Power BI update.

Field synonyms are an important part of Q&A because users often have a variety of terms that they use to refer to the same field, such as total sales, net sales or total net sales. This update now supports sharing synonyms between everyone in your organisation. This means that you can now leverage your co-workers’ synonyms and minimise duplicate effort when adding synonyms to your models.

To connect to shared synonyms, navigate to Q&A setup -> Field synonyms and click on ‘Get more synonyms’.

This process may take a few seconds, but once it’s completed, you also have the option to share your synonyms with everyone else in your workplace too. It should be noted that the synonyms are shared when you publish the report.

Any shared synonyms that match with fields in your model will show up in the ‘Suggested terms’ section. Then, you may click the plus icon (+) on the suggested term to add it as a field synonym.

As new synonyms get shared within your organisation, you can click the Refresh icon to ensure that your ‘Suggested terms’ are in-sync with your organisation, viz.

In Power BI Desktop, you may update your sharing synonyms settings in the Q&A setup itself or within the Options dialog, under Data Load -> Q&A- > Share your synonyms with everyone in your org:

You can also update this setting in the ‘Dataset settings’ within Power BI Service:

Additionally, administrators may choose to disable Synonym sharing within the Admin Portal by navigating to Tenant settings -> Q&A settings.

Check back next week for more Power BI tips and tricks!