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

Starting a report


You can build reports using either the Power BI Designer or Power BI for the Office 365 site. In this chapter, we will build the reports with the Power BI Designer and then in Chapter 6, Adding ERP Data, we will import and modify the reports using Power BI for Office 365 sites.

Tip

If you have ever used Microsoft Excel with Power View, the Power BI Designer and Power BI for Office 365 work the same way; the reports will be presented in the left-hand side pane and the individual datasets will be presented in the right-hand side pane.

Building a report with the Power BI Designer is fairly simple. Starting with a blank report canvas, we will add all the data visualizations with a drag and drop method from the datasets fields located on the left-hand side of the Power BI Designer window. We will build each visualization on its own report for clarity purposes.

Bar graph Estimated Amount by Customer

Most of these reports will be built using the Opportunities dataset, but we will also...