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Showing posts from September, 2017

AP Automation in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain

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As a solution architect, prospects and clients often ask me for ways to improve their Accounts Payable process.  They receive hundreds of invoices every month, and it can take considerable amount of time to enter all of the detail as well as attaching the invoice for reference during the approval process.  This is an area where we have often needed to bring in an ISV solution, but that could cause other issues.  Microsoft has been doing considerable work around automation for AP and they recently released a public preview of their Invoice Capture solution. I have had the opportunity to set this up in one of my test environments so I could get an idea of what they have to offer.  As we would expect, the Invoice Capture solution is built on the Power Platform.  It uses a model driven Power App along with Power Automate Flows to integrate with Dynamics 365 Finance.  However, since it is a solution, they have done much of the work for you, including creating the standard flows to load the
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Making the important numbers stand out

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With so much information available today, many people are simply overwhelmed by the data.  This is important for us to remember when we are designing reports and visualizations.  We need to help our users understand the story we are telling and one way to do this is to draw their attention to the important information. The eyes go directly to change and difference, so conditional formatting is a great way to make data stand out.  However conditional formatting in Power BI can produce some pretty ugly results.  In this article, I am going to show some tips to help use conditional formatting to focus on key numbers of the report. I will start with a simple matrix report that shows the monthly and yearly sales growth by brand.  In this case we only have 10 brands, but you will notice nothing really jumps out to you.  As a consumer of this report you must read through each row. So let’s go to the format tab on the visualization pane and turn on conditional formatting. 
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A recap of Power BI World Tour - New York

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I am just returning from presenting at the Power BI World Tour in New York.  This was a great event with around 150 attendees from many different companies.  Some were experienced with Power BI and many were just getting started. Microsoft presented a roadmap session on Power BI and showed some of the new and upcoming features.  I was excited to see Bookmarks.  This feature will allow for improved navigation through reports and really help with storytelling.  There were also other sessions on licensing, Enterprise governance, PowerApps, Flow and Azure Data Warehouse.  In addition, many partners and consultants presented sessions covering everything from basic DAX to developing a Business Intelligence Roadmap.   Of course there was also time to meet other users and a lot of learning took place at breaks and meals. I was lucky to assist in moderating one of the closing sessions, Use What You Learned.  Many in the session were new to Power BI, but it was obvious they were v
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