Pivot tables are the basic building blocks of analysis in Excel. Almost any dashboard will incorporate pivot tables or pivot table-like functionality as part of its core. At their simplest, pivot tables let you group and summarize data in different ways to provide interesting views of data. At their most complex, they provide nearly infinite ways to analyze and visualize data. We can't fit an infinite number of ways in this book, so we'll use some common scenarios here.
In this chapter we will start building our Dynamics GP dashboard by learning about:
Creating pivot tables from GP 2013 Excel report data
Creating pivot tables from GP 2013 data connections
Copying pivot tables
Creating connected pivots tables from Excel
Creating Excel Report Builder pivot tables
Creating Power View reports
Throughout the course of this book, we're going to build a dashboard that looks like the one in the following screenshot, and we're going to use pivot tables as...