Dynamics 365 Business Central: Microsoft Stack Explained, Power BI

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Microsoft Stack Explained, Power BI

Hey everyone so we're up against the whiteboard, so we're going to go and talk a little bit about concepts with the Microsoft stack.

We're beginning a series on  Power BI and how  Power BI interacts with PC we've done it before and we're getting into it again, so let's just take a look at the how the stack works: we have the cloud which is Microsoft cloud and one of the apps is Business Central, that's what we've been demoing mostly and going through, another app is  Power BI, so I'm just going to call it P bi. Data will be coming from Business Central because that's our ERP that's where we have all the data entry and it's sitting on a lot of stuff like inventory data, GL data, customer data all of that. Then we have Power BI which is going to be reporting out of that, so we want the data to go into Power BI and so we can see the visualizations now, how do we set this up?

We have Business Central in the cloud, this is the Microsoft cloud and we just go into a different app which is Power BI, and we start that up and create the connection to Business Central and retrieve data. I'm going to just show you how to get to that point and get for-example, inventory data into Power BI where we can see how much you have on hand of each one of your items.

Let's take a look at the system, I'm here in coffee mugs incorporated in Business Central and what I want to do is get into Power BI and start reporting in Power BI the data that's in Business Central. I want to get out of the Business Central app and into the Power BI app, I go here into all apps, I'm in the stack basically and into Power BI, Power BI is a different app in the stack and this is basically the login screen for that. What I want to do is go into workspaces, I've created a workspace, you can just do by creating an app workspace for a university test, so here I have no dashboard reports or anything, this is completely empty.

What I want to do now is download the desktop version of Power BI, I just go up here and download the  Power BI desktop version which I already did and installed so, I have that here and I'm logged in as Paul, so you make sure you're logged in the same credentials as you logged in into Business Central. Now, what I want to do is just view an item list, I just go up here in get data, more and I go ahead and type in Business Central, I get the icon for Business Central; if you have on-premise Business Central, you pick this one, but I have it in the cloud; I go ahead and connect and now it makes a connection to Business Central in a cloud and gives me a list of all of the web services that I have access to.

It's important to note that this is these are web services, just make sure I'm logging in that's the right person, it does do this funky character thing but okay, I'm signed in. Now, I get this navigator and it's showing me the web services first it's going to show me all of the companies that I have access to and I'm going to go into coffee mugs, and then I get the web services so, I'm interested in seeing the items and gives me a preview of the items, I'll just load that and now I have a connection to the item web service or the items web service in Business Central.

This is basically the item list, I'm going to go ahead and visualize this, I'll just take a table throw that in here and I say I want the number I want the description, let's go ahead and get the item category right there, and let's get inventory, right here, so now I visualize this, and there's a number of issues here. For example, I have negative inventory that's really not good, I should never go into negative and the system shouldn't allow me to go into negative so, we got to take a look at that. Also the item category code is empty on a couple of things so maybe in the next video we're going to use Business Central to fix these things because we noticed these issues and that's actually easy to do.

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