Microsoft Dynamics GP Excel Dashboards

Over the past two weeks, I have downloaded, installed, and been playing with my latest demo toy: Excel Dashboards for Microsoft Dynamics GP! In all fairness, this is not a new product, but rather a research being conducted by the Microsoft Dynamics GP Product Management team on the subject of Business Intelligence. However and to drive the topic, they have created a really cool dashboard using Microsoft Excel 2013, which I also happen to be running on my machine.

Excel Dashboard

Installation

The first thing to do is to download the dashboard which you can find here. Of course, most of the settings are tailored for my friend and Microsoft Program Manager, Jared Hall's computer, who kindly put this dashboard together for your delight, so some work is needed to make things work.

Once you have downloaded the spreadsheet, you will need to follow each of the steps provided on the Instructions sheet in the workbook, including running an embedded stored procedure against your company databases. This stored procedure compiles some GL ratios and piggy back on a few already pre-written table valued functions created for the SRS KPI reports.

Dashboard Instructions sheet

The additional steps (3 thru 6) explain how to change the data connections to look at the company database in your environment. Very key is, if you ARE NOT running Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you should follow step 6 to disable the data connections. In particular, I did not have CRM on my laptop, so I removed the data connections and remove the rows where data was supposed to be pulled from CRM to have a clean looking spreadsheet.

I have now showed this dashboard to two prospective clients and needless to say they have all drooled over it, since it works with the financial data in real time. This dashboard plus the Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 Web Client, and Microsoft Excel 2013 have all been a total hit!

NOTE: Microsoft Office 2013 is available via MSDN or you can download the preview from the Microsoft Office site.

Of course, a research won't be complete without feedback, so here's where you come in. The Microsoft Dynamics GP Product Management team is asking you to answer 3 simple questions:

1. What changes would you make to the current dashboard? Of course, to answer this one you effectively need to have downloaded and play with it for a bit.

2. What other dashboards and what information would you incorporate according to your role in your organization?

3. Of course, what do you do? What's your role in the organization and what challenges do you face?

Please feel free to direct your answers to the Inside Microsoft Dynamics GP blog as comments to the original article:

Business Intelligence Investigation

Now, to my esteemed colleagues in the Product Management team, it would be cool if these questions could be added to a short survey on your site (or elsewhere) as it would make people want to actually provide some feedback... just saying!

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/