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

Formatting amounts and dates


The good thing about the Dynamics CRM is that it already has the correct formats you need for amounts and dates because of the data structure of this application. In Chapter 3, Building Summaries and Custom Calculations, you will be able to build sales summaries with the newly created datasets by pivoting and grouping the data. There may be a case where we need to format the dates or amounts while doing this.

Here is an example of how to format amounts:

  1. In Power BI, select the OpportunitySet dataset from the left-hand side of the query window .
  2. For the EstimatedAmount or ActualAmount column, click on the icon with the EstimatedAmount or ActualAmount header name and reset the column data type to value by unchecking and then rechecking the box.

  3. Highlight the EstimatedAmount or ActualAmount column and change the Data Type to Decimal Number in the home ribbon:

  4. Once the column values are changed to decimal, the column data types will be updated to decimal amounts:

Here...