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

Removing unused columns


Looking at every field in a dataset can become cumbersome and confusing, so the first thing you want to do to organize these Dynamic CRM datasets is to remove unused columns. This will help the performance as well as the view ability of each datasets. Using the dataset list, you need to design a query that only uses the columns that will be used in the reports in the sales productivity dashboard.

The home ribbon on the main Power BI Query window gives you a lot of different options to add and remove columns and records from a dataset. For this book, we will focus on choosing just the columns we need for each dataset.

Tip

If at any time you did need to add or remove just one column at a time, this option is available in the home ribbon or by right-clicking on a column and choosing from the menu that appears.

Here is an example of how to do it:

  1. Using the System User dataset, first remove columns by navigating to the home ribbon tab in the Power BI Designer and select Choose...