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How to Create a Weekly Report in Power BI with AI

Cody Schneider•

Let's be honest: building a weekly report is one of those tasks that feels both essential and incredibly tedious. You know you need to track progress, but the process of exporting data, wrestling with spreadsheets, and manually updating charts every Monday is enough to drain your enthusiasm. What if you could automate the heavy lifting and let AI help you find the actual insights?

This tutorial will show you exactly how to do that. We'll walk through how to create a dynamic, automated weekly report in Power BI, using its built-in AI features to speed up your analysis and uncover trends you might have missed.

First, What Makes a Weekly Report Actually Useful?

Before diving into Power BI, it's worth taking a moment to define what we're aiming for. A great weekly report isn't just a data dump, it's a communication tool. It should tell a clear story about what happened last week and why it matters.

A good report typically does four things well:

  • Focuses on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Don't show every metric available. Highlight the handful of numbers that directly reflect progress toward your goals. For a marketing team, this might be website sessions, new leads, and cost per acquisition.

  • Is Highly Visual: People are better at spotting trends in charts than in tables of numbers. Use line charts for trends over time, bar charts for comparisons, and KPI cards for big-picture numbers.

  • Provides Context: A number on its own is meaningless. Is 1,000 weekly site visits good or bad? A useful report provides context, like comparing this week's 1,000 visits to last week's 800 or the weekly average.

  • Is Actionable: It should prompt a decision. If a campaign is underperforming, the report should make that obvious so you can investigate. If a new content piece is driving tons of traffic, that should be clear so you can double down.

Step 1: Get Your Data Into Power BI (and Automate It)

The foundation of any automated report is an automated data connection. The old way of downloading a new CSV file every week is the number one source of reporting busywork. Here’s how to set up a live connection so you only have to do it once.

Connect Your Data Source

Power BI can connect to an enormous range of data sources, from Excel workbooks and CSV files to databases and SaaS applications like Salesforce or Google Analytics.

In Power BI Desktop, navigate to the Home tab and click on Get Data. Choose the source that's right for you. For simplicity, let's assume we're using a Google Sheet that gets updated automatically, or an Excel file stored in OneDrive/SharePoint.

  • Pro Tip: Using a cloud-hosted file (OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Sheets) beats a local file on your computer every time. It's the key to enabling automated refreshes later on.

Clean and Prepare Your Data in Power Query

Once you connect your data, Power BI opens the Power Query Editor. This is a powerful tool for cleaning and shaping your data before it ever hits your report. You don't need to be a data-wrangling expert, but a few basic steps can save you headaches down the line:

  • Review Column Headers: Make sure headers are correct and there are no extra rows at the top. Power BI is usually smart enough to promote the first row to headers automatically.

  • Check Data Types: Power Query tries to guess the data type for each column (Text, Whole Number, Decimal Number, Date, etc.). Scan the icons next to each column header and correct any that are wrong. For example, ensure your 'Date' column is actually a date type and not text.

  • Filter Unnecessary Data: If your report only needs recent data, you can filter the 'Date' column to only include data from the past year. This makes your report faster and more focused.

Once you're happy, click Close & Apply on the Home tab. Power BI will load the cleaned data into your report's data model.

Schedule an Automated Refresh

This is the most critical step for automation. Once you've published your report to the Power BI Service (the web-based version), you can tell it to refresh the data automatically on a schedule.

  1. Publish your report from Power BI Desktop.

  2. Go to https://app.powerbi.com and find your dataset in your workspace.

  3. Click the ellipsis (...) next to the dataset and select Settings.

  4. Expand the Scheduled refresh section.

  5. Toggle it on, set the refresh frequency to Daily (so it's ready every Monday morning), and choose a time.

Now, your report's data will always be up to date without you lifting a finger.

Step 2: Use AI Features to Build Your Report Faster

With your data foundation in place, now comes the fun part. Instead of manually dragging and dropping fields to build every single chart, you can use Power BI's AI features to get to insights much faster. These tools are especially helpful for those who don't think of themselves as "data people."

Q&A Visual: Ask Questions in Plain English

Think of the Q&A visual as a search bar for your data. You type a question, and it generates a chart for you. It's a game-changer for quick, exploratory analysis.

How to use it:

  1. In the Visualizations pane, double-click the Q&A icon.

  2. A question box will appear on your report canvas.

  3. Start typing! For example, you could ask:

    • total revenue last week (this will create a KPI card)

    • top 5 products by units sold (this will create a bar chart)

    • sessions by date for the last 30 days (this will create a line chart)

Once Power BI generates a visual you like, you can click the icon on the top right to convert it into a standard visual in your report. It's an incredibly fast way to move from a question to a finished chart without having to manually find and drag the correct fields around.

Smart Narrative: Get Your Summaries Written for You

We've all stared at a chart and then had to type up a summary explaining what it shows. The Smart Narrative visual does this for you automatically.

How to use it:

  1. Create a visual, like a line chart showing website traffic over time.

  2. With the visual selected, find the Smart Narrative icon in the Visualizations pane and click it.

  3. Power BI will instantly generate a text block with a dynamic summary, automatically calling out trends, high points, and low points.

The best part is that the text is dynamic. When your data refreshes next week, the narrative will automatically update to reflect the new numbers. This saves a massive amount of time on weekly commentary.

Anomaly Detection: Spot What's Out of the Ordinary

Sometimes the most important insight is hiding in plain sight - a sudden, unexpected spike or dip in performance. Anomaly detection automatically finds these outliers for you in your time-series data.

How to use it:

  1. Create a line chart with a date field on the X-axis and a metric you want to track (like conversions or sales) on the Y-axis.

  2. Select the line chart. In the Visualizations pane, go to the Analytics tab (the one with the magnifying glass icon).

  3. Expand the Find anomalies section and click + Add.

  4. Power BI will instantly analyze the data series and highlight any points that fall outside the expected range. You can even adjust the sensitivity to find more or fewer anomalies.

When you hover over an anomaly, Power BI will offer potential explanations based on other data in your model. This turns the question from "What happened on Tuesday?" into an immediate, AI-powered investigation.

Step 3: Assemble Your Weekly Report Dashboard

Now, let's bring it all together into a clean, easy-to-read weekly report page.

  1. Start with KPIs: Use Card visuals to display your main weekly metrics at the top of the page (e.g., Weekly Sales, Signups, Active Users).

  2. Show the Trend: Add a Line Chart for a key metric over the past 30-60 days. Enable Anomaly Detection on this chart to automatically surface anything unusual.

  3. Add a Breakdown: Use a simple Bar or Column chart (which you can create quickly with Q&A) to show a breakdown, like 'Sales by Region' or 'Traffic by Source.'

  4. Provide a Summary: Click on an empty part of your report canvas and add a Smart Narrative to generate an overall summary of the key takeaways from the page.

  5. Include a 'Last Refreshed' Date: It’s a small but important detail. A simple card visual with a measure like "Data refreshed on " & FORMAT(NOW(), "mmmm d, yyyy") builds trust and lets your team know they're looking at the latest data.

Your goal is a one-page view that someone can understand in 60 seconds. The big numbers are at the top, trends are easy to spot, and AI-generated summaries provide instant context.

Final Thoughts

Setting up an automated weekly report in Power BI transforms your reporting process from a repetitive chore into a strategic weekly check-in. By connecting your data directly, setting a refresh schedule, and leveraging AI tools like Q&A and Smart Narratives, you spend less time building reports and more time acting on the insights they provide.

While Power BI is incredibly powerful, the initial setup and learning curve can still be a hurdle for busy marketing and sales teams. We built https://www.graphed.com/register to make this process even simpler. Our goal is to eliminate the complexity entirely by allowing you to connect sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads in one click and then build entire live dashboards just by describing what you want in plain English. This way, you get the real-time insights you need in seconds, without ever getting bogged down in the technical setup.