Cleaning Up Power BI in Microsoft D365 Business Central

Cleaning up Power BI in Microsoft D365 Business Central

We are going to keep going as Power BI with Business Central. I'm just being pushed into Power BI here ok. I really like Power BI, just it’s a reporting tool and we are doing Business Central and I only have two videos a week, but hey! Let's do it. 365 forces you everywhere, I might just have to do more than two videos a week. I'm going to start covering any ground here.

I am here in Business Central, I got the power BI report that I created in the past two videos. If I go into Power BI, you can see that out here you can see that I'm connecting it to dates, dates were the issue of the last video which we figured out by creating a date table within Power BI. And now this is all hocked up to dates. I can move this around here and things change.

What I want to do is go like hey, it's nice to see these columns here and this moves with months here and all of that. But let's put some more slices and let's clean this up. To be honest with you, when you have Business Intelligence stuff it's nice to be able to play with the figures, but it's even nicer when it looks nice.

I know hardcore people out there that are like, you know what? numbers are numbers, we a running a business and who cares how it looks but. Hey! We like nice things around us, right? it so let try to make it a little bit prettier. I don’t know if you noticed but I changed the heading here from being something weird, underscore sales amount. They sounded the same so changed them to Actual sales amount and estimate sales amount

All you have to do to do that is to go into the tables right here and right click into properties and you can change it and rename it here. I did that for those, which fixed the naming for those two. Another thing that would be nice, instead of looking at all of these, it would be nice to see them by item category and to filter by category to see columns. I like columns better.

What I need to do is click on the visualization over here and click on columns a look it changes it immediately. Now I have how much we sold and how much we estimated to sell for each one, side by side. You can see we are a little bit bellow on some of them and we don’t have estimates on the other. So, we should go back on accounting or sales management and ask them to give an estimate on everything.

Item Category
How do we do that? let's add a slicer. We pick a slicer over here, I know if you have been working with Power BI a lot, this might be obvious to you. No big deal. But maybe there are some people out there that look at Power Bi and think, maybe we should start using that, and this is kind of a great intro. How easy it is once you have things connected to throw in visuals. So, in this visual, we want to do an item category, so I go into item ledger entries and pick item category right here, actually let me pick that from the item card, so I got to be proper. The item card is over here, and I pick item Category.

The reason why I'm looking at the item category on the item card rather than the item ledger entries, even though it exists in both, it's because in the item ledger entries they are not connected to the item budget entries, so I might just be filtering the item entries. You have to filter the top entity. Over here I can just click on Table and now I only see tables, or I can click on chairs and I only see chairs.

This is nice because you might want to see how you are doing in total on those things. So, right now we have the item category code, we got this. This is looking good. Let's go ahead and publish this and see a better view on Business central. I'm going to save this as test 5. You can see I've been testing a lot.

I just published, and I published it in my workspace. I was just throwing up into the cloud, success, now it's there. Now I just go into Power BI; Microsoft wants some feedback, not right now; Refresh my workspace, we just go ahead and look over here, workspaces, my workspace, reports. And now you can see test 5 is already in. I can look at it in Power BI; Worth Noting, I'm always plugin this into Business Central; but this could be exposed in other ways, I can actually invite people to look at this report over the net without going into Business Central. I can just share it over here and maybe we should do a video about that.

If I go back to business central right here, and this is my power BI report and I want to go and select a report, get the list of the report, I have test #5, I enable it, not its working and I want to select it. Now I have my new report right here, I know this looks small and in a previous video I made everything really big, so we could use this. But it still works, but also what you can do is just go in here and say expand report. And then you are looking at it like that.

Even if its small and you don’t want to make all the fonts crazy big because they look ugly when you expand, you just expand it, it's no big deal. It's in business central and you got all the numbers here, everything looks prettier. Power BI pretty cool, we'll definitely be doing more Power BI in my videos connecting into Business Central.