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

Filtering your data


Being able to filter data is essential to any dashboard. With Power BI, data can be filtered in a variety of different ways with data columns, report pages, individual charts, tables, and/or maps. We can also add data slicers to all the report pages that will allow even more real-time interaction.

The best thing about Power BI is that it has a lot of features built-in already to filter the report data. If you simply select a chart or map on a report page, the values and visualizations on the rest of the page will change, as shown in the following screenshot:

Filtered Sales Productivity Report

This works in Power BI because all the visualizations are already connected based on either the automatic relationship detection and/or the merged and combined relationship that we created in Chapter 2, Organizing and Consolidating Dynamics CRM 2015 Datasets. How cool is that?

Note

With the Power BI Designer and Power BI for Office 365, the automatic data detection is enabled and will...