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

Preparation


The idea behind any financial dashboard is to give users a snapshot of key business metrics. On a car dashboard, more important information is given greater weight; that is, the gauges are bigger, placed in the center, and so on. Periodically important data is highlighted as necessary, like when the low fuel light comes on to ensure that you are paying attention to the fuel gauge. It doesn't hurt to think that way for financial dashboards as well. We don't want to clutter up our dashboard with too much information.

Now that we have the data that we need, we need to set up a sheet to hold our dashboard. To create a new sheet:

  1. Open the GP 2013 Dashboard.xlsx file that we saved in the previous chapter.

  2. On the bottom of the sheet to the right of the tabs, click on the plus (+) button to create a new sheet.

  3. Use the left mouse button to drag the new sheet all the way to the left, making it the first sheet on the left.

  4. Right-click on the sheet name and select Rename.

  5. Rename the sheet as Dashboard...