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

Connecting to data in Dynamics GP


Now that we have made a simple Excel data connection, let's focus on getting data from Dynamics GP. The first step in connecting to data is knowing where the data resides. In the case of Dynamics GP, that would be a Microsoft SQL Server Database. No worries, you do not have to go into SQL, be an SQL God, or even know SQL. We'll provide you with tips to help you get to the data you want and make sure the data requires as little cleanup as possible. We'll discuss cleaning, which is also known as transforming, cleansing, editing, modeling, and so on, in a later chapter. There are three ways to get data from SQL into Power BI; we'll review those options in the following sections.

Direct SQL Connect

Let's begin with directly connecting to the SQL database. Power BI makes this super easy:

  1. Open Microsoft Power BI. Upon opening, if you receive a Getting Started window, close it. We'll connect to the data from within the Power BI application.

  2. On the Power BI ribbon,...