Book Image

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013

By : Mark Polino
Book Image

Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013

By: Mark Polino

Overview of this book

Accounting systems like Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 hold a wealth of information. Excel 2013 provides a great tool for linking to, extracting, analysing, and presenting that rich data to help companies make better, faster, and smarter decisions.Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013 covers how to get the rich, detailed information contained in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and present it in an attractive, easy-to-understand way using Excel 2013. The book shows in detail how to build great-looking dashboards that enhance a company's decision-making process.This book shows you how to get at the rich, detailed information contained in Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and present it in an attractive, easy-to-understand way using Excel 2013. This guide will take you from the basics of setup and deployment to creating secure, refreshable Excel reports. Using a whole host of tools available within Excel, this tutorial will show you how to visualize your data using simple conditional formatting techniques, easy-to-read charts, and allow you to make your data interactive with Slicers. Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013 provides a way for you to easily build that interactive dashboard that your CFO keeps asking for.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. Adding Interactivity with Slicers and Timelines

We’ve made a lot of progress with our dashboard, but we’ve still got some elements to go. In this chapter, we’ll wrap up the core pieces of the dashboard with a look at slicers, including a new type of slicer, the timeline.

A dashboard without interactivity is simply a pretty report. Giving users the ability to review scenarios and explore the data is an important part of any dashboard. But you also want to provide enough control over user interaction to ensure that the results are meaningful. For example, if a user selects a year, it’s important that all of the related pivot tables update to that year, otherwise a user might be looking at inconsistent data. In this chapter, we will look at elements designed to help provide that interactivity.

Slicers provide a way to give the user additional control over the information being delivered. Excel 2013 added a new type of slicer, the timeline. A timeline is a date-based slicer designed...