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

Preparing column data types


Now that you understand the query process and what datasets you need to connect together, let's see how to modify the data. You will need to modify data types in each Dynamic CRM dataset list mentioned before.

We will start with the OpportunitySet; here is how we do it:

  1. In Power Designer, select the OpportunitySet dataset from the left-hand side menu of the Power BI query window:

  2. Once in the query view of the OpportunitySet dataset, select and change the column data type for CustomerId to show the name. To do this, click on the icon with the CustomerId header name and change the column data type to Id and Name. This will produce two columns for both data types:
    Staying in the OpportunitySet dataset, click on the icon with the OrginatingLeadID header name and change the column data type to ID. This will show the Dynamics CRM GUID for each Lead record:
    For the OwnerID, click on the icon with the OwnerID header name and change the column data type to Id and...