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

Sharing your results on the fly


Using the Q&A functionality in Power BI for Office 365 sites opens the door to a world of future possibilities. Posting dashboards to a website is the one feature that has the potential to make it easy for anyone to perform business intelligence, for example, the sales manager who asks for a weekly sales report may just not have to ask for it anymore. We can provide him with a straightforward self-served business intelligence method.

A great way to get that sales manager and others involved immediately is to simply e-mail them the Q&A result page. Sending them something prebuilt on real-time data allows them to test scenarios until they get comfortable with the Q&A feature.

Here is a quick way to provide someone access to the exact Q&A result you have created:

  1. In the Power BI Q&A, enter a question and review the results.

  2. While still in Power BI for the Office 365 site, copy the URL and send it to any other users. When a user opens the URL,...