One problem with creating a pivot table from data in Excel 2013 is that we have to bring the data from Dynamics GP 2013 into Microsoft Excel. That's not much of a burden when we're dealing with a few hundred rows, but when you get to transactional data, it's easy to have a couple of hundred thousand rows. This is where pivot table performance starts to bog down. For companies with a lot of accounts, high transaction volume, and a lot of history, it's easy to exceed Excel's maximum row count of 1,048,576 rows. Microsoft Excel 2013 lets us build pivot tables without having to bring the data into Excel.
When we deployed Dynamics GP 2013's Excel reports, we also deployed the data connectors. The connectors let us use data in Dynamics GP to build pivot tables without having to bring detailed data into Excel 2013. Let's use this to start to build our dashboard. For much of the rest of the book, you'll want to save the file that we're working...