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 1. Getting Data from Dynamics GP 2013 to Excel 2013

Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 is a terrific enterprise reporting package. But when it comes to analyzing data, few tools can compare to the power of Microsoft Excel. When you put the two together and use Microsoft Excel to analyze the data collected in Dynamics GP, you can build something magical. By magical, I mean a dashboard that the CFO keeps asking about. Together, we will explore using the power of Excel 2013 and GP 2013 to build a straightforward dashboard.

We are going to build a great-looking, financial-oriented dashboard. Don't worry; we won't be doing any programming, and there are no Excel macros. This dashboard is built using nothing but native Excel functionality such as charts, pivot tables, and conditional formatting.

Before we can build a great Excel-based dashboard, using the data in Dynamics GP 2013, we have to get the data out of GP and into Excel. This chapter covers nine major ways to get data from Dynamics GP into Excel with a few extra options thrown in at the end. Some of these methods pull data from the interface in Dynamics GP; others bypass the interface and pull data directly from SQL Server. Generally dashboards are designed to pull from the database for the best performance, but sometimes you have to use what you have access to. In Chapter 2, The Ultimate GP to Excel Tool: Refreshable Excel Reports, we will start building the dashboard using my favorite way to get data out of Dynamics GP refreshable Excel reports.

By the end of this chapter you should be able to get data into Excel using:

  • SmartList exports

  • SmartList Export Solutions

  • Navigation List Exports

  • Report Writer

  • Microsoft Query

  • SQL Server Reporting Services

  • Management Reporter

  • SQL Server Management Studio

  • Analysis Cubes

We will briefly look at some third-party options, and you'll also learn about licensing requirements around using Dynamics GP 2013 data with Microsoft Excel.