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

Slicers and timelines


A dashboard without interactivity is simply a pretty report. Giving users the ability to review scenarios and explore the data is an important part of any dashboard. However, you also want to provide enough control over user interaction to ensure that the results are meaningful. For example, if a user selects a year, it's important that all of the related pivot tables update to that year; otherwise, a user might be looking at inconsistent data.

Slicers provide a way to give the user additional control over the information being delivered. Excel 2013 added a new type of slicer, the timeline. A timeline is a date-based slicer designed to make it easy for users to work with dates.

Let's add these elements to our dashboard to help provide that interactivity:

  • Slicers

  • Timelines

Slicers

Slicers provide interactivity to pivot tables. The simplest definition is that they are replacements for pivot table filters, but that doesn't do them justice. Slicers don't have to be tied to filters...