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

Creating pivot tables from GP 2013 data connections


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...