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

Calculating fields


The Power BI Designer gives you the options to add the custom date, time, and duration formulas to your datasets with simple menu selections. These formulas operate in the same way an Excel formula would if you were using the Power BI add-in for Excel. In this example, we will create a simple formula to calculate the number of days an opportunity has been open using the built-in functionality from the Power BI Designer.

Here is how we do this using the Opportunities dataset:

  1. In the query view window, highlight the Created On column and then select Date | Age from the main menu bar under Add Column:

  2. A new column called AgeFromDate will be created at the end of the dataset with the total number of days down to the second. Once the column appears, select Duration | Total Days from the main menu bar under Add Column to change the values to just the number for days:

  3. Rename the column to Days Open to prepare the dataset for the reports.

  4. For advanced calculations, you can adjust the...