Building Power BI dashboards from CRM data

Dynamics 365 offers a wide range of reporting capabilities. View, charts, SSRS reports, and Word and Excel templates are the usual options. The out-of-the-box reporting capabilities are great when reporting on Dynamics 365 data; however, if you need richer analytics that span across multiple platforms, Power BI is your solution.

In this recipe, we will create a simple pie chart that displays accounts' cities filtered by the state of Washington (WA) to demonstrate how to integrate a Dynamics 365 centric Power BI report into your Dynamics 365 dashboard. Our only data source will be Dynamics 365.

Getting ready

In order to embed Power BI charts into your Dynamics 365 instance, you'll need to enable the capability first. To do so, navigate to Settings | Administration | System Settings and click on the Reporting tab. Then select, Yes next to Allow Power BI visualization embedding, as shown in the following screenshot:

Given that this recipe focuses on the...