Book Image

Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI

By : Steve Ivie
Book Image

Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI

By: Steve Ivie

Overview of this book

<p>Dynamics CRM 2015 holds a wealth of information about customers and the sales pipeline, but sometimes leaves users with basic end-user reporting and dashboard options. Power BI is a great new tool for analyzing and presenting data, giving us the ability to dig deeper into the information. With the increased requests for real-time sales analytics, Power BI when connected to Dynamics CRM offers a self-service approach to build, shape, and present data through an easy-to-use interface. The set of features within Power BI will give all users a tool to generate real-time sales productivity reports and dashboards to enhance their sales performance.</p> <p>This book will provide you with the skills you need to learn how to build and present Dynamics CRM 2015 sales dashboards using Power BI. It follows a step-by-step process to build an interactive dashboard by organizing and consolidating datasets, improving the look and feel of graphs, charts, and maps, and enhancing data clarity with filters and slicers.</p> <p>By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will learn how to use the Power BI Q/A functionality to query data in the dashboard, extend the dashboards to the mobile apps for the iPad and Surface, and leverage the pre-built workbook template provided by Microsoft for Dynamic CRM 2015 sales, service, and marketing dashboards.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. Organizing and Consolidating Dynamics CRM 2015 Datasets

The most important part of designing your sales productivity dashboard is the data you have behind it. Think of your dashboards as a house; if you build your house without a solid foundation, no matter what is added to it, it will always fall apart. Sometimes, it is as simple as that. Your dashboards all start with well-planned out foundation of datasets.

Using the Power BI Designer, we will build and review the Dynamics CRM datasets as we go, always ensuring the accuracy of the data and the relationships. Once the datasets are created, we will be able to start organizing and formatting the data so that your sales team can use it.

For a salesperson or manager trying to make reporting and dashboards look clean, the goal is to transform the unstructured datasets into useful sales queries that can be used with the sales productivity reports and dashboard. To achieve this, we need to understand the actual querying and cleanup process...