Outside of your standard Dynamics AX 2012 SSRS reporting system, there are extra tools at your disposal for creating reports. Microsoft Excel has a suite of “Power BI” tools that can help visualize your data and reports in a way that is quick and aesthetically pleasing; sometimes it’s tough to communicate your message to the people in charge of developing your reports. With the easy to use Power BI tools that are available to Office 2013 users, you can create very appealing reports in Microsoft Excel without having to wait.
For this example, I will be using Power View; Power View is a very powerful, very flexible reporting tool. After you activate Power View, you can create Power View reports with a few simple steps:
- Under the Data tab on the Ribbon, select “Get External Data”
- Select “From Other Sources” and choose your data source; if you want a report based on your Dynamics AX database, you should choose “From SQL Server” and follow the instructions to select the database that you are using in Dynamics AX
- Select the table or tables that you want to manipulate for your report and add any details that you feel necessary to label your report
- Select to view your data as a Power View Report and you are set!
From there, you can add and remove fields by dragging and dropping them into your fields section, and manipulate your report as much as you desire. You can filter your results a number of ways. This gives you lots of flexibility and tons of options for customizing your report. Power View is able to connect to Bing Maps for some really slick map reports, such as this one I generated of a sample customer list.
You can zoom in and out, roll over each result to see the company based in that location, and view the entire globe from both a topographical view, and a street view. If I were to filter my results by year, I could see which areas my company was succeeding in and which areas are emerging for my company. This knowledge could be used to focus marketing efforts on areas where the company does not have a strong record of results, in order to try and win business in these regions.
For those times when the SSRS template reports do not quite fit your reporting needs, Microsoft Power View can be a useful application. And that is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the reporting services that Microsoft Excel can provide; the rest of the Microsoft “Power BI” add-ins make Excel an extremely valuable tool for creating customized reports to supplement the reporting tools that Dynamics AX already provides.