How to summarize Power BI reports with Copilot and check the figures

Copilot in Power BI can turn a report page or a whole report into a written summary in three documented ways: a prompt in the Copilot pane, a narrative visual placed on the report canvas, and a summary attached to a standard email subscription. All three read the visuals that are on the report rather than querying the full model, and all three require the report to sit in a workspace on paid Fabric capacity (F2 or higher) or Power BI Premium (P1 or higher), with Copilot enabled by a tenant administrator.

The text reads well; the numbers inside it are what needs checking. Executive summaries tend to fail in a few predictable places: a margin drop described in percent when it should be in percentage points, a simple average of regional rates presented as the company rate, or a period that silently changes because a filter was ignored. Microsoft's documentation describes when accuracy can fall, including sampling on large visuals and visual-level filters that Copilot does not yet apply.

The method below uses a small illustrative quarterly sales page, the prompts you would give Copilot, and the correct figures computed in Python, so that any summary Copilot writes for a page like it can be checked line by line. Every requirement and limit cited comes from Microsoft Learn pages verified on November 13, 2026.

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THREE WAYS TO GET A COPILOT SUMMARY OF A POWER BI REPORT.

The Copilot pane is the option for anyone who can open the report. Microsoft documents the Copilot button in the ribbon of Power BI Desktop and of the Power BI service, in both edit mode and view mode, so a report consumer without edit rights can still ask for a summary. Suggested prompts such as "What is this report page about?" and "Prep a summary for my team" appear when the pane opens, and a free-text prompt can ask for something more specific, such as a summary suitable for an email to leadership. Footnotes in the answer show which visuals Copilot referenced.

The narrative visual is the option for report authors. Because it is a visual, Microsoft states that you need write permissions to create it. You select the Narrative icon in the Visualizations pane, choose an option in the "Create a narrative with Copilot" dialog, and decide whether the narrative covers the entire report, specific pages or selected visuals. The text cannot be edited directly; you change it with "Adjust your summary with Copilot" or a suggested prompt. The narrative does not refresh automatically when viewers change slicers, so viewers have to select its refresh button.

The subscription summary is the option for recurring distribution. In the Power BI service, a Standard Subscription can include a "Summary by Copilot (preview)" section that adds a Copilot-generated summary of the page or the full report to the email. Microsoft documents that the summary runs on behalf of the subscription owner and that user-defined prompts are not supported.

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Method	Who can use it	Custom prompt	Status
Copilot pane	Report viewers and editors	Yes	Documented
Narrative visual	Users with write permission	Yes, to adjust	Documented
Subscription summary	Subscription owner	No	Preview

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Two shortcuts described on the same Microsoft page, the Summarize button on the ribbon in view mode and the "Copilot summary" icon in a visual header, were marked as temporarily unavailable when the page was checked. The Copilot pane prompt is the dependable route for now.

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POWER BI COPILOT REQUIREMENTS FOR REPORT SUMMARIES.

The capacity rule is the one that stops most teams. Microsoft's Copilot overview lists paid Fabric capacity (F2 or higher) or Power BI Premium (P1 or higher) and states that trial capacities and free SKUs are not supported. It also states that a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User license alone is not sufficient, because Copilot requires organizational capacity. A report published to a Pro workspace on shared capacity is therefore outside the documented scope. The license and capacity combinations, with prices, are covered in our reference on Copilot in Power BI requirements, capacity, licenses and regions.

The tenant settings come next. An administrator has to enable Copilot in Microsoft Fabric and turn on the tenant switch, and the capacity has to be in a region listed in Microsoft's Fabric region availability page. If the tenant or capacity is outside the United States or EU data boundary, Copilot is disabled by default unless the administrator enables the setting that allows data sent to Azure OpenAI to be processed outside the tenant's geographic region.

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Requirement	As documented on Microsoft Learn
Capacity	Paid Fabric F2+ or Premium P1+
Trial or free SKUs	Not supported
Pro or PPU license alone	Not sufficient
Tenant	Copilot enabled, tenant switch on
Region	Fabric region availability list
Language	English; others not officially supported

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Language is a practical limit for multinational teams. Microsoft states that prompts in languages other than English might occasionally return relevant responses, but multilingual use is not officially supported.

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WHAT COPILOT READS WHEN IT SUMMARIZES A POWER BI REPORT.

Microsoft describes the Copilot pane summary as a two-step process: Copilot identifies the relevant visuals, up to 20, based on the prompt, and then summarizes the data from those visuals. It looks at visual metadata, so clear visual titles, axis labels and field names have a direct effect on the quality of the text. The narrative visual follows the same principle; its documentation says it pulls information from what is on the report canvas, not the underlying semantic model.

The row limits decide whether Copilot is reading your visual or something else. Summaries consider only visuals with fewer than 30,000 rows of data; above that, Copilot answers from the semantic model rather than the visual. For table and matrix visuals, Microsoft warns that summaries might not be accurate above 500 rows, and above 100 rows the answers use the semantic model. Tables paginate after 100 rows and only visible rows are summarized, text longer than 500 characters is truncated, and expandable visuals such as matrices and decomposition trees are summarized in their current state.

Filters are the most common source of a wrong period or a wrong scope. Page and report filters are supported, along with basic categorical filters and slicers. Visual-level filters are not yet supported, and among advanced filters, relative date filters, blank or empty filters and numeric range filters are excluded. A card that shows "Last 3 months" through a relative date filter can therefore be summarized without that restriction. Field parameters are not supported as slicers or filters either.

Microsoft adds that accuracy might decrease when Copilot resorts to sampling, and recommends fewer visuals per page, meaningful names, time series aggregated by week or month, and fewer than 10 series per chart.

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WORKED EXAMPLE: A QUARTERLY SALES PAGE IN POWER BI.

The illustrative page below compares the second and third quarter of a fictional company across four regions. In a real report, these figures would come from a table visual or a matrix with four rows, well inside every row limit Microsoft documents, plus a card for total revenue and a card for gross margin.

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Region	Q2 revenue (USD)	Q3 revenue (USD)	Q2 gross profit (USD)	Q3 gross profit (USD)
North	1,240,000	1,318,000	471,200	487,660
South	980,000	903,000	323,400	307,020
East	1,560,000	1,702,000	624,000	646,760
West	720,000	761,000	252,000	243,520

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Illustrative data, not from any real company. A useful prompt names the audience, the measures, the comparison and the format, and asks Copilot to stay within the visuals on the page:

Summarize this page for the executive team in five bullet points.
Compare Q3 with Q2 for total revenue, gross profit and gross margin.
Name the region with the largest revenue increase and the region with a decline.
State margin changes in percentage points.
Use only the visuals on this page and cite each visual you use.

A second prompt asks Copilot to show its arithmetic, which turns a polished paragraph into something an analyst can audit quickly:

For each figure in your summary, list the visual it came from,
the two values you compared and the formula you used.

Both prompts work in the Copilot pane, and the first can also be given to a narrative visual through "Adjust your summary with Copilot". Subscriptions accept neither, because they do not support user-defined prompts.

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THE CORRECT FIGURES FOR THE COPILOT SUMMARY.

The expected results were computed in Python with pandas from the illustrative table. Any executive summary of this page should match them.

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Measure	Q2	Q3	Change
Total revenue (USD)	4,500,000	4,684,000	+184,000 (+4.09%)
Total gross profit (USD)	1,670,600	1,684,960	+14,360
Gross margin	37.12%	35.97%	-1.15 percentage points
East revenue (USD)	1,560,000	1,702,000	+142,000 (+9.10%)
South revenue (USD)	980,000	903,000	-77,000 (-7.86%)

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The regional detail completes the picture. East had both the largest absolute and the largest percentage increase and accounts for 36.34% of third-quarter revenue. North grew 6.29% and West 5.69%. South is the only region with lower revenue, yet it is also the only region whose margin improved, from 33.0% to 34.0%. West had the largest margin decline, from 35.0% to 32.0%, followed by East (40.0% to 38.0%) and North (38.0% to 37.0%).

The check script is short enough to keep next to the report:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({
    "Region": ["North", "South", "East", "West"],
    "Q2_Revenue": [1240000, 980000, 1560000, 720000],
    "Q3_Revenue": [1318000, 903000, 1702000, 761000],
    "Q2_GrossProfit": [471200, 323400, 624000, 252000],
    "Q3_GrossProfit": [487660, 307020, 646760, 243520],
})
tot = df.drop(columns="Region").sum()
print("Revenue change %:", round((tot.Q3_Revenue / tot.Q2_Revenue - 1) * 100, 2))
q2_margin = tot.Q2_GrossProfit / tot.Q2_Revenue * 100
q3_margin = tot.Q3_GrossProfit / tot.Q3_Revenue * 100
print("Margin Q2 / Q3 %:", round(q2_margin, 2), round(q3_margin, 2))
print("Margin change (pp):", round(q3_margin - q2_margin, 2))
df["QoQ_pct"] = (df.Q3_Revenue / df.Q2_Revenue - 1) * 100
print(df[["Region", "QoQ_pct"]].round(2))

Run on pandas 3.0.5, it prints a revenue change of 4.09%, margins of 37.12% and 35.97%, a change of -1.15 percentage points, and the regional growth rates in the table above.

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CHECKING A COPILOT EXECUTIVE SUMMARY BEFORE IT GOES TO LEADERSHIP.

Three arithmetic traps sit inside this small page, and each one produces a plausible sentence that is wrong. The first is the margin unit. The company margin fell from 37.12% to 35.97%, which is 1.15 percentage points; expressed as a relative change, the same move is a 3.10% decline. A summary that says "margin fell 3.1 points" or "margin fell 1.15%" has mixed the two, and readers will take the larger number at face value.

The second trap is averaging rates. The simple average of the four regional third-quarter margins is 35.25%, while the company margin weighted by revenue is 35.97%. In the same way, the simple average of the four regional growth rates is 3.31%, against an actual total revenue growth of 4.09%. Any company-level rate in the summary should be traced to a total, not to a row average.

The third trap is the period and scope. If the page relies on a relative date filter or a visual-level filter, Microsoft's documentation says Copilot does not apply it, so a summary can describe more data than the page shows. Compare the period named in the summary with the filter pane, and use the footnotes to confirm which visuals were read. When a figure has no citation, treat it as unverified.

Interpretation stays with people. Copilot can describe that South declined while its margin improved, but whether that reflects pricing, mix or a one-off order is a judgment the report owner has to make before the summary is sent. The same approach applies to variance pages; our walkthrough of a Power BI budget vs actual dashboard with Copilot and DAX variance measures shows how to build measures that make those checks easier.

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COPILOT SUMMARIES IN POWER BI EMAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS.

Subscription summaries are labeled preview in Microsoft's documentation, last updated in July 2026. To add one, you select Subscribe to report, then Create a subscription, choose Standard Subscription, set recipients and schedule, and select Preview summary in the "Summary by Copilot (preview)" section. Selecting Attach full report summarizes the whole report instead of a single page. For new subscriptions that are Copilot eligible, the summary is enabled by default, and existing subscriptions need the toggle turned on.

The documented limits shape how far a subscription summary can be trusted without review. Copilot does not generate these summaries for dynamic per-recipient subscriptions, paginated reports, scorecards or dashboards. The summary runs on behalf of the subscription owner, so every recipient receives the same text. If Copilot takes too long, which Microsoft says usually happens with large reports, the email may arrive without a summary. Filters saved with "Include my changes" are used when the summary is generated.

The preview is a point-in-time summary, and the delivered text changes with the schedule and the data, so the checks above should be repeated on the first deliveries. Send now delivers to all recipients, so test with a subscription addressed to yourself first.

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DATA HANDLING AND GOVERNANCE FOR COPILOT REPORT SUMMARIES.

Microsoft's privacy page for Copilot in Power BI states that data stays within the organization's tenant boundary, is not used to train foundation models, and that Copilot does not store prompts or responses after the session ends. It also states that the subscription summary is the same as the one generated when a narrative visual is added to a report. The Copilot pane documentation confirms that row-level security and object-level security remain enforced, so a viewer's summary reflects only the data that viewer is allowed to see.

Subscriptions are the exception to that per-viewer behavior. The summary runs as the owner, so the owner's data access determines what every recipient reads; if the owner sees all regions and a recipient normally sees one, the email can describe data that recipient would not see in the report.

Capacity consumption is the remaining governance point. Copilot usage draws on the Fabric capacity behind the workspace or on a dedicated Fabric Copilot capacity if one exists. Teams sizing that capacity can compare license and capacity options in our analysis of Power BI Pro vs Premium Per User vs Fabric F64.

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POWER BI COPILOT SUMMARIES: WHAT DEPENDS ON YOUR TENANT AND REPORT DESIGN.

All three Copilot summary methods work from the visuals on a report and need paid Fabric F2 or Premium P1 capacity or higher, a tenant with Copilot enabled and a supported region. Pro or Premium Per User licenses alone do not qualify, and English is the only officially supported language.

What varies from report to report is accuracy. Visuals above 30,000 rows, tables above 100 rows, visual-level and relative date filters, and dense time series all push Copilot toward the semantic model, sampling or an unfiltered scope. On a clean page like the four-region example, the correct summary figures are a 4.09% revenue increase, a gross margin down 1.15 percentage points to 35.97%, East as the strongest region and South as the only decline, and any Copilot text that departs from those figures needs correcting before it is shared.

Microsoft has not published response-length limits, a supported-language list beyond English, or a date for the return of the ribbon and visual-header summary shortcuts, and subscription summaries remain in preview. A summary that has passed the arithmetic check and the filter check is ready to send; one that has not is still a draft.

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