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 5. Charts: Eye Candy for Executives

Charts are eye candy for executives. They make a dashboard look great. Charts can simplify complex data. They can reveal patterns and trends. Charts can also clutter up a dashboard and make it hard to read. There are tons of resources available on the web for building charts in Excel, so we won't dig into every aspect of charting. We will focus on the elements we need for our dashboard. These represent some of the most common charts for dashboards. After the easy stuff, we'll do an uncommon, but really useful speedometer chart. Finally, we'll look at a different type of chart, a Sparkline. Specifically, we're going to build the following:

  • Combo bar and line chart for revenue and net income

  • Pie chart for receivables

  • Speedometer chart for cash

  • Bar chart with a trend line

  • Sparklines

The theme of communication and understanding continues with charts. Charts in a dashboard should be simple and easy to understand. They should make information clearer. Avoid...