Book Image

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 - Second Edition

By : Mark Polino
Book Image

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 - Second Edition

By: Mark Polino

Overview of this book

Microsoft Dynamics GP is a complete ERP solution that is extremely beneficial for small to midsize organizations in helping them grow exponentially. The book shows you in detail how to build great-looking dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP that enhance a company’s decision-making processes. This guide will take you from the basics of setting up and deploying to creating secure, refreshable Excel reports. Using a whole host of tools available within Microsoft Dynamics GP and Excel, this tutorial will show you how to visualize your data using simple conditional formatting techniques and easy-to-read charts, and allow you to make your data interactive with slicers. We will also cover core topics such as Business Analyzer, Microsoft SQL Reporting services reports, BI360, and more. You will find out to use Power BI, share and refresh data and dashboards in Power BI, and use Power BI Query Editor. By the end of this book, you will have all the information required to build interactive dashboards using Dynamics GP.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Understanding standard visuals


Let's begin creating visualizations. We'll only cover a few visuals, providing you with the foundation to create some amazing reports and dashboards.

Getting quick information with cards

The first visual we'll create is a card; specifically, a single number card. It's probably the least exciting, but it certainly has its place in business intelligence. We'll create a visualization that displays the total balance of our Accounts Payable (AP). In our example, if there is only one number, putting in a chart or graph will not offer any additional information and, in fact, might make it harder to read quickly. Look at the following image. I've displayed the total AP balance using three different chart visuals: Column, Pie, and Line. None of these visuals are easy to read or make sense of. Using these would be having a chart for the sake of having a chart, not for providing valuable insight:

Let's create our first visual, the Card, by following these steps:

  1. Open the...