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

Joining customer aging


For our customer health report, we need to create a single dataset that combines the sale pipeline information with the customer aging information.

Here is how we join the datasets:

  1. Create a copy of the Accounts dataset and rename Customer Health.

  2. In the Query View window, update the data type to text for both columns: AccountNumber and Customer_ID in the Customer Aging and Customer Health datasets.

  3. Staying in the Query View window, select Format | Trim from the Transform tab under the main menu to ensure that there are no extra spaces in the AccountNumber and Customer_ID columns:

  4. Select the Merge Columns tab under the Transform menu tab at the top of the Query View window. Merge the dataset with AccountNumber and Customer_ID:

  5. After the merging process is complete, we will see the Dynamics GP Customer Aging information alongside the Account Sales information from Dynamics CRM: