Excel is already one of Microsoft’s cornerstone software solutions for businesses today and it continues to extend into the realm of Business Intelligence with the recent release of Power BI. This new self-service analytics tool will now be available to the masses and is a huge win for those seeking increased data analytics using the familiar interface of Excel. Here at DynamicPoint we are already utilizing the functionality in conjunction with SharePoint to provide our customers with interactive reporting tools across the information within our applications.
Power BI capabilities:
- Discover & Combine data from multiple sources
- Model & Analyze by bringing the power of in-memory analytics and flexible modeling into Excel with Power Pivot
- Visualize data in new ways with bold interactive visualizations in Excel using Power View and Power Map
- Share & Collaborate with Power BI sites that quickly share live reports and custom data sets with your team
At DynamicPoint we needed to provide interactive reports for our customers’ employee expenses, accounts payable, and requisition needs. Before purchasing our business automation software applications our customers needed to be certain they could access, analyze, and share the most impactful data that was to be captured in our SharePoint applications. To accomplish this we leveraged what Microsoft had already given us, Power BI.
SharePoint allows access to the data in SharePoint lists that with one click, can be exported to Excel. This ensures that certain users can manipulate the data and even layer in additional data sources as needed for more interactive reporting. For more graphical analysis of data we have leveraged Power View to supply interactive dashboards that can be easily altered by the end user to filter the information they are interested in.
Take a peek at our SharePoint Reporting Video to see how we have leveraged Power BI and Excel to ensure delivery of the most applicable data for management reporting and executive dashboards.
by Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint – SharePoint Expense, Invoice & Requisition Management applications built exclusively for the Microsoft Dynamics community.
