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

Setting up refresh schedules


Keeping the dashboard's data up to date used to be a painful process. However, now we have the configuration settings to schedule dataset refreshes in Power BI for the Office 365 site.

Tip

Currently, Power BI does not support refresh schedules from a Power BI Designer file import, but this functionality is coming soon. For the latest information about refresh schedules, refer to https://support.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/474669-refresh-data-in-power-bi.

Let's take a look at an example of how we could schedule a refresh or manually refresh datasets:

  1. Under Datasets in the main site window, select the fly out submenu for sales productivity and then click on SCHEDULE REFRESH:

  2. Once the new site window appears for Settings, review the Schedule Refresh and Manage Data Sources options: