Book Image

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013

By : Mark Polino
Book Image

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013

By: Mark Polino

Overview of this book

Accounting systems like Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 hold a wealth of information. Excel 2013 provides a great tool for linking to, extracting, analysing, and presenting that rich data to help companies make better, faster, and smarter decisions.Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013 covers how to get the rich, detailed information contained in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and present it in an attractive, easy-to-understand way using Excel 2013. The book shows in detail how to build great-looking dashboards that enhance a company's decision-making process.This book shows you how to get at the rich, detailed information contained in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and present it in an attractive, easy-to-understand way using Excel 2013. This guide will take you from the basics of setup and deployment to creating secure, refreshable Excel reports. Using a whole host of tools available within Excel, this tutorial will show you how to visualize your data using simple conditional formatting techniques, easy-to-read charts, and allow you to make your data interactive with Slicers. Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013 provides a way for you to easily build that interactive dashboard that your CFO keeps asking for.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Pivot Tables: The Basic Building Blocks

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...