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

The stacked combo chart


The first report we need to build will be based on the Opportunities queried dataset. We need to show all Deals Closed by Date. A good chart to use for this is a stacked combo chart that includes the bar and the common line charts.

Using this stacked combo chart, we will be able to gain visual insights into the sales revenue trending over time by Practice compared against the overall Amount. This report should expose negative and positive selling trends. In the future, it may even be used to predict future sales decisions.

Stacked Combo Chart Estimated Amount by Close Data and Practice

In this line chart, we need to organize the reporting measures based on the Amount and Closed Date fields.

Let's build the chart. Perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to the Fields and Filters area on the left-hand side of the form window and select Practice, Amount, and Close Date from the Opportunities queried dataset:

  2. The default chart shown will always be a vertical bar chart; to change...