As I continue my revision for the MB2-713 certification (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales) I am completing blog posts on each topic I revise. This post is about PowerBI.

PowerBI is used to transform data into “rich visuals”. What this means is it a powerful graphical reporting tool that can greatly extend the standard reporting feature of CRM.

To access PowerBi, goto powerbi.com and select login.

Next you will be prompted to Start ..

After a short pause you will be welcomed to PowerBi and given options to open content pack library or import / connect to data.

Initially select “Get” under services then select the services option. This will let you find the CRM online pack. Click “Get” on that.

Now after a short pause you will be prompted for the OData Service URL. This can be obtained from looking in customizations / developer resources in your CRM settings. Plus change the authentication method to oAuth2. (You may be asked to login to CRM at this point.)

Tip: You can get the organization url from Developer Resources in the customizations area of CRM. But take careful note of the format. The end of my endpoint address in CRM was ../2011/Organization.svc, I changed this to ../2011/OrganicationData.svc

After another pause you will see a prompt that says Importing Data, this could take a while! Not long after this the dashboard may load but could have no data. Give it chance! What’s happening at this point, is a copy of your sales data is being created to support the analysis that PowerBI will conduct. (This is important to realise as you may need to refresh this data later.)

After a few more seconds the dashboard will be loaded, as shown below.

At this point your learning about PowerBi is best done with some hands on time. Try navigating around the dashboards and reports to see what is available but also to learn how the charts react with each other. Also look at how you can drill onto charts, such as leads for deeper information.

Drilling into tiles shows the “natural” language query that has been used. These can be changed on the fly to help manipulate data. For example, below I have selected the revenue tile and changed 12 months to 2 months. Instantly the sales revenue figure dropped from 325k to 172k.

Also, try adding to the natural language queries. Such as add “by account name” to the end of this query. Or by owner etc. (or even “by account name and owner”)

In addition to the sales manager dashboard you will find a dynamics CRM sales report. This is actually split into many pages which can be accessed from the tabs at the bottom of the screen. Again I suggest some hands-on time looking at the reports and how they operate.

Clicking on datasets gives access to the data that makes up the existing dashboards and reports. In here you can create your own visualizations of the data.

Right clicking on the data set name will allow you to schedule a refresh of the data or refresh now.

In terms of MB2-713 revision, in my opinion, PowerBI more than any feature is best understood by using the product. I hope this post has given you enough pointers to get started with that. Enjoy.
J