As I prepare for my Dynamics 365 certification in sales (MB 210), I’m creating blog posts based on my revision. I hope that collectively these posts may prove useful to anyone also preparing for the MB 210 exam. This time I will cover how to configure the sales content pack for Power BI.

You will see that the sales content pack is mentioned in the skills measured statement within the section headed “Perform Configuration”.

Power BI is a big subject…. but luckily for us…. only the ability to configure the sales content pack is mentioned in the skills measured statement! I doubt that the MB 210 exam will require us to become Power BI experts but knowing the basic concepts and specifically how to enable the sales content pack will be essential.

Power BI is used to transform data into “rich visuals”. What this means it is a powerful graphical reporting tool that can greatly extend the standard reporting feature of Dynamics 365.

Install Power BI

Assuming you will be preparing for you MB 210 using a trial of Dynamics 365 …. Before you can work with Power BI you may need to purchase Power BI. Don’t worry as the free version of Power BI will work for our purposes. Although we still need to “buy” it. Therefore, your first task will be to open the 365 admin center and select the purchase services option. Search for Power BI and select the free version.

Next you can review the details and select the “get it now” option.

Now we make our purchase. Notice that the value is zero per user per month.

Unfortunately, despite being free we must now place the order using “check out now”. This process will involve entering your credit card details. You will get a monthly “bill” from Microsoft but the value will be zero and nothing will be charged to your credit card.

Once the order process is completed, find your Dynamics 365 using in the 365 admin center and assign the newly purchased license. (As shown below.)

Open Power BI and Discover Content

Now Power BI is ready you can access it from https://app.powerbi.com
or select the Power BI app from the “waffle” icon”. (As shown below.)

Your first task will be to connect Power BI to your Dynamics 365 instance. To do this use the “Get data” option. And under the services option also select “Get”.

Power BI can connect to many different data sources. But the one we are interested in is “Sales Analytics for Dynamics 365”. Below you can see that I have searched using the word “sales”. I have then located the package I require allowing me to click the “get it now” option.

First you will need to enter the url for your Dynamics 365 instance. Power BI will also need to know the last month of your fiscal year. (Typically, this will be 12, assuming you wish to report yearly data in terms of typical calendar years.)

After clicking next you will be asked to confirm the authentication method. Enter “OAuth2”.

Open Power BI App

Now you have completed the setup of your Power BI app you can open it. Under the apps option, you can see below that I now have the sales analytics for Dynamics 365 app.

Opening my app will show a dashboard, similar to the one shown below.

Clicking on any tile in the dashboard will drill into the report behind that tile. By doing this you can review and filter additional information.

Our skills measured statement only reference ed the need to configure the content pack for Power BI but I still encourage you to explore the resulting dashboard / report. Maybe you could (should) mark some opportunities as won and review the impact on these reports!

Refresh Dynamics 365 Data

Changes to your Dynamics 365 data will (by default) be refreshed automatically into Power BI daily. Whilst testing you may want to manually force a refresh or change the frequency of data updates. For this select the “list” icon in the top right hand corner of the screen. (As shown below.)

Under the datasets option you will find a refresh icon. Selecting this will manually force a data refresh. Assuming you are using a trial with the typical sample dataset this process will only take a few seconds.

Additionally, if required, you can also use the “schedule refresh” option to control the frequency of data refreshes. Although whilst testing in a trial instance the default of daily is probably enough!

In terms of MB 210 revision, I do encourage you to configure Power BI and then experiment with what data is available. I hope this post has given you enough pointers to get started with that. Enjoy.