1. A computer-implemented method of making a presentation of data requested by questions received via a user interface of a database, wherein: the questions include respective sets of data items that are categorized as measures, which represent amounts, or categorized as dimensions, along which the measures can be arrayed, sets of data items in said questions include one data item of the measures categories, and another data item of the dimensions categories, and associations are combinations of related data items in the measures categories and data items in the dimensions categories, said associations specifying respective sets of data in the database that correspond to the combinations of data items, the method comprising the following steps: parsing, from a question received from a user via the user interface, a first data item belonging to one of the measures categories and a second data item belonging to one of the dimensions categories; determining a first association between the first data item belonging to the category of measures and the second data item belonging to the category of dimensions; searching a plurality of stored associations in a data storage device to find a second association similar to the first association; identifying presentation properties stored in said data storage device that correspond to the second association; selecting presentation properties for the first association from the identified presentation properties corresponding to the second association, the selected presentation properties for the first association describing how to present the data items of the first association; querying, based on the received question, the database to provide a set of result data corresponding to the set of the data items in the first association; and generating a presentation of the set of result data using the identified presentation properties.