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 4. Making Things Pretty with Formatting and Conditional Formatting

Now that we have our data elements for a dashboard, we'll start to pull the pieces together and format them. The stereotype is that accountants care more about the numbers than about presentation. The stereotype misses the point, as do some accountants. The point is to present the numbers in a way that they can be clearly understood. Burying important data in a long, ugly list of numbers is an accounting sin. So is hiding poor financial results by surrounding them with upbeat photos in an annual report. Both methods are attempts to hide the truth. With our dashboard, we are trying to present information in a way that makes it easy to understand and discover new insights. In this chapter we will start assembling and formatting our dashboard using:

  • Get Pivot Data

  • Excel formatting

  • Icon sets

  • Data bars

  • Color Scales

  • Other formatting

The idea behind conditional formatting is that we want data elements to change visually based on...