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

Bringing Dynamics GP 2013 information to PowerPivot


With Excel 2013, PowerPivot is now included and not a separate download. Parts of it still exist as an included add-on, and it definitely behaves a little differently than the Excel you used. For example, you can't key data directly into a PowerPivot sheet, and you can't change information that's been brought in.

Since we can't key data into PowerPivot, we have to get it there somehow. For GP data, there are a couple of commonly used options. These include:

  • Copying and pasting

  • Linking to a spreadsheet

  • Connecting via SQL Server

We will look at all three of these variants.

Copying and pasting

Sometimes you need to just get data into PowerPivot. Maybe it's a small amount that another source will use to look up information, like clarifying that 1 equals True and 2 equals False. Maybe the data source is in a place that is hard to connect to because of security constraints, physical location, or network controls. Whatever the reason, copying and pasting...