WG.14.AX2012.1.GUIDE.PDF: Self Service Reporting Using Excel and PowerView within Dynamics AX 2012 (Digital)
When people first think of reporting, they generally think about the old fashioned reports that they are used to requesting from the IT department which are probably created through some reporting tool like SQL Server Reporting Services. And although there are a lot of those reports available within Dynamics AX out of the box, they are not really reports that the end users are able to modify, and they are very rigid in their formatting.
Something that people don’t think about is that the forms that they are using every day are the best reports that are out there, and they can change them any time that they like. List pages give you a wealth of information that is filterable and then you can save away the view for reference later on giving you a quick and easy way to analyze your data.
Additionally, all of this information is exportable to Excel, creating a refreshable (and secure) worksheet with the data directly from Dynamics AX. Once you have the data in Excel there is no end wo what you can do with it, from creating pivot table to creating PowerView dashboards. These are all things that the users have been doing for years but refreshing the data has been a chore. Not anymore.
Finally, the users can create their own dashboards using the Analyze option that will create web based PowerView dashboards. These are even more powerful because they link to the cubes within Dynamics AX and allow the users to then convert them over to interactive PowerPoints at the click of a button.
All these reporting options are so natural for the user, they may not even realize that what they are doing is really impressive. It’s just Excel.
In this guide we will explore some of the reporting options that the users can take advantage of themselves using the tools that are so near and dear to their hearts already.
Topics Covered
- Using List Pages as user reports
- Use Edit in Grid as your reporting worksheet
- Adding additional fields to List Page views
- Filtering the data within the List Pages
- Using Filter by Selection within List Pages
- Saving Queries as Filters
- Creating Autoreports from Data Lists
- Exporting List Pages to Excel
- Making Excel exports refreshable (or static)
- Adding additional fields to the Excel Query
- Changing filters within Excel worksheets
- Creating PowerView Dashboards within Excel
- Viewing the query within PowerPivot
- Adding new columns to PowerPivot Data Models
- Switching to Advanced Mode within PowerPivot
- Configuring fields to show as images in dashboards
- Using images within PowerView dashboards
- Creating dashboards from within the Dynamics AX client
- Saving PowerView dashboards to SharePoint
- Exporting PowerView dashboards to PowerPoint
- Adding dashboards to Role Centers
Series: Dynamics Companions Walkthrough Guides
Digital: 126 pages
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