Dynamics 365 Business Central: Power BI Dashboards

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Power BI Dashboards

Back at the whiteboard so we're going to now go through how to publish Power BI dashboards and explain the Microsoft cloud stack all of that. We're inside the cloud; I'm getting good at doing this cloud diagram here; we have Business Central and we got Power BI and outside the cloud, we have Power BI desktop. So basically, what we want to do is create a dashboard, outside the cloud we have Power BI app, and this application runs locally on any device, on Apple iOS or Android or even on PC whatever you know Microsoft Surface. Just download it from the App Store and it can display visualizations from Power BI.

If you go into the cloud you view it on the cloud you get the report which is great, but if you want to have an app that just fires up and you want to see how your business is doing or how something within the business is doing, you just want to see the visualizations you kind of play around with visualizations on your app and download the data so you could possibly not be fetching it real-time or anything like that or refreshing it on the cloud,  you can do that with the app.

How do I get the data to the app? what happens is when you run the app, you synchronize everything that you have in the cloud. If you create it in the desktop, you got to publish the data back into the cloud, so you have a workspace in Power BI on the cloud, and you publish into that workspace. Then you retrieve the data into the app, and what's really cool about the app or what you really should focus on is using dashboards. The dashboard is the first thing that comes up when you open the app if you're kind of creating a really nice view for the user inside the app you should create dashboards.

You can create the dashboard inside the cloud right here, dashboard I'll just do it like that and that's what we're going to look at now. Then, as you create the dashboard, when you run the application on the app, you will see that that dashboard there. The dashboard, what is that? it's basically just taking elements out of the report and putting it up on top as a dashboard so that people when they log in they see that first.

Now we are moving a little bit more forward in Power BI. We start here in Business Central and we went into the Power BI desktop which I have right here, we created this report where we did add the description to each one of the items. It's sales amount, but actual. What I want to do now is publish this on the app, so I can see it on the app or I can publish it to someone else on the app so what we did is we published it up into the cloud, so now it's available in the cloud. When I logged into the cloud, I have all these different work-spaces, I actually just created one but if I had more they would be listed here, and this particular workspace has no dashboard, just has this report PPI which I created, which is coming from the desktop application along with the data set PPI.

I can take a look at the report and I get this screen, I can look at the data set and I see here I have these data sets which are from the desktop application published up. Now if I go into my app, Power BI app, I'm now logged in as Paul at an actor University and I have no dashboards, as I'm looking at things, I have nothing really shared with me. There are some apps out there, but these are the standard apps, I can get into the University test workspace and I can see the report. This is the app, right now imagine if I were on my phone or on a tablet or even just looking this up as a user that doesn't really have access to the cloud per se, going into the workspace is there but just wants to see it as an app like a high-level user like C level or something like that.

I can also filter on various categories here, it's interactive, if I wanted to see just tables it highlights the tables and grades out everything else, of course, we're interested in the cups and we don't have a whole lot of cups in the system right. This is what I'd actually drill into the report by going into work-spaces, but if I go into the main page, click on workspace, what we want to do is create a new dashboard and I have here a bunch of reports, of course, to come from the standard; and interesting enough I can just browse into that just to show you; this is a standard report created by Microsoft for Business Central and I can click on the financial dashboard in here, this is also displayed in Business Central and you see that in various pages you can bring up the financial dashboard but you could also expose that in Power BI, so you don't have to have a user that goes into Business Central, you can just expose it in Power BI,  have a Power BI user which is way more inexpensive and they could be viewing the data like this. This is interesting and handy.

Create a new Dashboard
now what we want to do is create a dashboard for what we just created, the PPI report. When a person logs into the workspace or into their place they will get a dashboard. I go into the cloud application which is right here, I have no dashboards so I'm going to go ahead and create a dashboard. I just go into home right here, see dashboards, create a dashboard. I can do a whole lot in the cloud application so, not in the desktop application but also in the cloud. I can almost do everything that I did in the desktop in the cloud it just works a little bit differently, I prefer doing it on a desktop edition, but you can work with it straight on the cloud.

If I create a dashboard, I'm just going to call this coffee mug dashboard, now I have this and there's nothing on the dashboard, I have nothing in here I just created like an empty container.  I can go into the report here and I can pin this by hitting that pin button and I want to pin this to the existing dashboard, I just say yes. I also want to pin this to the existing dashboard, so I go back into the dashboard, now I've created these two things for the dashboard. That dashboard is kind of taking the main things out of the reports and bringing them to the attention of the user, so they just look at the dashboard, they don't really need to go into the reports.

If I go back here, into the application, I'm just going to sync it, now that's up to date and there's a notification, you can see that coffee mug dashboard has been created. I can just click on that and get into that dashboard and now that's how it looks, so it's much cleaner than going into the report. Technically if you're formatting data for the user, you just set it up as a dashboard and then I can just click on it and get straight into the report element, etc. This is very cool, here, for example, is a very wide view of that. Interesting, I actually pinned both of these into the dashboard but they're not connected, so if I click on this it doesn't filter on it just brings it up, so if I actually go into the report and I click on it that it works, so features functionalities, when it's pinned on the dashboard it's not connected, when you get into the report if it's in the same report it's connected. These are the things you kind of learn as you're going through it but minor details, either way, you get the functionality you need so I hope that was of some help thank you until next time.