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PowerBI

Make Common Queries Available For Everyone By Saving Them To Office365

February 11, 2014
Business Intelligence, Dynamics AX, Excel, Office 365, PowerQuery
1 Comment

Queries are like mining for gold, because everyone is searching for the motherload of data that is hidden within Dynamics AX, and once they find it, they mine it until it dries out and they have to start prospecting again.  Also, the secret maps to that data are hidden away, usually on someone’s own personal hard drive, and are rarely shared with other prospectors.  Office 365 and Power Query changes that because it allows you to share any of your queries with everyone within the organization, allowing everyone including the non-technical users that would never create a query.

No more claim jumping, there is enough data out there for everyone to mine.

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Publish Queries As OData Document Sources For Users To Query In Excel

February 10, 2014
Dynamics AX, Excel, PowerQuery
4 Comments

If you want to publish out data to the users so that they can create their own reports, or run their own analysis, there is in a simple and secure way built into Dynamics AX.  You can register your queries as Document Data Sources and then they automatically become available through the OData service within Dynamics AX.  Additionally, all of the default security that you put in place around the data will be respected by the service because you are using Dynamics AX to create the query.

No more ODBC connections, or even worse… unsecured Access databases.

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Creating PowerView Reports From Analysis Services Cubes In Excel Using PowerPivot

February 5, 2014
Business Intelligence, Dynamics AX, PowerPivot, PowerView
3 Comments

If you have ever tried to create a PowerView report within Excel that is populated directly from an Analysis Services Cube, then you may have come across a small roadblock where PowerView refuses to work.  All is not lost though, you can trick Power View into thinking that it is querying a real table by using PowerPivot to craft the query first.

The only downside to this is that we don’t have to use PowerQuery as much any more…

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Export PowerView Dashboards as PowerPoint To Create Dynamic and Interactive Presentations

January 9, 2014
Dynamics AX, PowerBI, PowerView
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Export PowerView Dashboards as PowerPoint To Create Dynamic and Interactive Presentations

Export PowerView Dashboards as PowerPoint To Create Dynamic and Interactive Presentations

PowerView is a great tool for creating reports and dashboards directly from Dynamics AX, and is by far one of the cooler reporting tools that you can use.  It has a very cool feature that allows you to export any of your saved dashboards to PowerPoint, and these reports become interactive when you go into SlideShow mode.  This is a great way to create template presentations that you can use over and over again and always have the most up-to-date data showing.

Never again will you have to create 100 variations of the same sales report where the only difference is the customer account that you are reporting on.

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Create PowerView Dashboards directly from Dynamics AX

November 22, 2013
Business Intelligence, Dynamics AX, PowerBI, PowerView
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Create PowerView Dashboards directly from Dynamics AX

Create PowerView Dashboards directly from Dynamics AX

If you pay attention to your Dynamics AX screens, you may notice a new button has shown up with an Analyze This label.  When you see it, click on it as soon as you can because it will open up a PowerView reporting dashboard that allows you to create your own reports on the fly.

With this new tool you can create your own dashboards and reports without having to bother your IT department.

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Perform What-If Analysis Within Excel using PowerBI

November 15, 2013
Business Intelligence, Dynamics AX, PowerBI, PowerPivot, PowerView
1 Comment
Perform What-If Analysis Within Excel using PowerBI

Perform What-If Analysis Within Excel using PowerBI

Sometimes you want to have a way to juggle numbers a little to perform quick what-if analysis, but you are not committed to the change at the time so you really don’t want to be changing the codes within Dynamics AX just yet, and would rather have the changes remain off-line until some time in the future.

In this example we will show you how to use an off-line worksheet that contains all of the changes that you want to make along with PowerPivot and PowerView to create a simple dashboard to track the impact that changes would have on your data.

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