Book Image

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 - Second Edition

By : Mark Polino
Book Image

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 - Second Edition

By: Mark Polino

Overview of this book

Microsoft Dynamics GP is a complete ERP solution that is extremely beneficial for small to midsize organizations in helping them grow exponentially. The book shows you in detail how to build great-looking dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP that enhance a company’s decision-making processes. This guide will take you from the basics of setting up and deploying to creating secure, refreshable Excel reports. Using a whole host of tools available within Microsoft Dynamics GP and Excel, this tutorial will show you how to visualize your data using simple conditional formatting techniques and easy-to-read charts, and allow you to make your data interactive with slicers. We will also cover core topics such as Business Analyzer, Microsoft SQL Reporting services reports, BI360, and more. You will find out to use Power BI, share and refresh data and dashboards in Power BI, and use Power BI Query Editor. By the end of this book, you will have all the information required to build interactive dashboards using Dynamics GP.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2016 Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Speedometer chart


A speedometer chart is a classic dashboard presentation tool, but it's not a chart available in Microsoft Excel. This tool exists in Microsoft Power BI (we'll discuss this in the next chapters), so I am expecting it to appear in Excel at some point. Since it doesn't exist, we will build one.

Speedometer charts are just what you would expect. Like a car speedometer, a speedometer chart has a dial and a needle with the needle moving from left to right, depending on the value. They are extremely useful for showing levels. In our case, we will build one that shows the level of cash. We'll add some red, yellow, and green indicators to help users understand whether the level of cash is acceptable. Our finished speedometer chart should look like this:

As a speedometer chart doesn't exist as a type in Excel 2016, we will build it with an optical illusion. Our speedometer chart uses half of a pie chart to make the needle and half of a doughnut chart to make the dial. Pies, doughnuts...