Using Full Page Apps in Dynamics 365 Finance

-
Image
Have you ever wanted to put a website or a model-driven Power App in one of your existing Dynamics 365 Finance workspaces or forms?  You might already know you can create a new workspace with a website, but did you know you can add the website to an existing workspace? Here is an example of the Vendor invoice entry workspace with the Invoice Capture Power App embedded. Prior to using this feature, you need to turn on "Saved views support for workspaces" in feature management. Once this feature is enabled you can follow the following steps to add the Invoice Capture app or any model-driven Power App or website to an existing workspace. Open the vendor invoice entry workspace From Options - choose Personalize this page From personalize menu - select the 3 dots - and then Add an app Once that is selected (the screen goes gray) - click on the section header where you want to add the app (in my example I put it in Links) On the Add an app menu - choose Website Give it a name (my e
Post a Comment

Small Multiples in Power BI

-

I have been spending the past few months getting more familiar with Power BI.  There is a lot of information available, but it is sometimes hard to find exactly what I am looking for.  As I have been creating reports and visualizations in Power BI, one thing I have been missing is “small multiples”.  For those that are not familiar with the term “small multiples”, it is sometimes called a trellis chart, lattice chart, grid chart or panel chart.  It is a series of similar charts using the same scale and axes, allowing them to easily be compared.  The advantage is that it uses multiple views to show different dimensions of the dataset.

This is a visualization many other tools have, but until yesterday I have not been able to create them in Power BI.  As I mentioned there is a lot of information available for Power BI, and there are also a lot of custom visualizations available.  I had looked in the Office Store before, and I had searched small multiples, but with no success.  Yesterday I was watching one of the many Power BI videos available one YouTube.  It was Take Power BI Visualization to the Next Level by Reza Rad.  In this video he highlighted the custom visual, Infographic Designer.  This is a free custom visualization available in the Office Store, provided by Microsoft.  It is a very unique visualization that allows you to create highly tailored visualization for your specific topic.  I can see the possibility to create some really compelling dashboards with this visualization, but one of the possibly hidden features of this visualization is you can use it to simply create “small multiples” for column, bar or line charts.

To better understand how you might use this functionality, let’s take a look at an example.  You have been tasked with creating a chart to analyze your sales by product category over the last three years in each of your geographical markets.  With this example you have one value, sales amount and three dimensions, product category, geographic market and year.  There are many different ways you might approach this task.  One approach might be to create a clustered bar chart showing sales amount by product category by year.  However, this does not show the geographic markets.  
So you might add a slicer to this chart or you could add a filter for the geographic market.  Then you could make two more charts, changing the filters to create your own version of small multiples.  This might accomplish the task, but it is difficult to read, especially if you want to compare 2012 Asia cell phone sales to 2012 North America cell phone sales. 
This is where using small multiples with the Infographic Designer can help.

Before you get started you will need to go to the Office Store and download the custom visual.  Once you have downloaded it, simply import it into Power BI Desktop and it is ready to use.  You will see a new icon available in your list of visualizations.
 
Select the Infographic Designer visualization and you will see there are four areas for your data fields.  Category, Measure, Column by and Row by.

Column by and Row by allow you to quickly create small multiples, so the fields you drag here will determine how your rows and columns are configured.   On the format tab, you can set the layout of the small multiples, the fonts and select the chart type you want to use.  In just a matter of a minute or two you can quickly create your multiple charts allowing you to easily analyze your sales between years, categories and markets.


This is just the beginning of what is possible with this visualization.  Download it and give it a try.  I am looking forward to working more with it and hope to share more information soon.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a date table with a fiscal year in your Power BI data model

-
Image
There are many different articles available on Time Intelligence in Power BI.   Many new users to Power BI do not really understand the importance of having a date table in their data model.   I have spoken on this topic on many different occasions and continue to receive a lot of questions about the topic.   In this article I am going to try and cover a few tips on how to work with dates in your Power BI model. Many new users simply use the Auto Date & Time function of Power BI.   This function automatically creates a hidden date table for each field in the model with a date or date/time data type.   This function is enabled by default and it allows for slicing by Year, Quarter, Month and Day.   The problem with Auto Date and Time is that it only works with a standard calendar (Jan to Dec).   It requires a datetime column in the fact table.   It does not work with multiple fact tables and it does not support time intelligence calculations (YTD, MTD, etc.).   So there must be
Read more

Using Full Page Apps in Dynamics 365 Finance

-
Image
Have you ever wanted to put a website or a model-driven Power App in one of your existing Dynamics 365 Finance workspaces or forms?  You might already know you can create a new workspace with a website, but did you know you can add the website to an existing workspace? Here is an example of the Vendor invoice entry workspace with the Invoice Capture Power App embedded. Prior to using this feature, you need to turn on "Saved views support for workspaces" in feature management. Once this feature is enabled you can follow the following steps to add the Invoice Capture app or any model-driven Power App or website to an existing workspace. Open the vendor invoice entry workspace From Options - choose Personalize this page From personalize menu - select the 3 dots - and then Add an app Once that is selected (the screen goes gray) - click on the section header where you want to add the app (in my example I put it in Links) On the Add an app menu - choose Website Give it a name (my e
Read more

Showing the last 12 months based on a date slicer

-
Image
When working with financial and sales data, clients often ask for charts showing the last 12 months of data.  This is actually very simple using relative date filtering. In addition, they might ask to compare to the same month last year.  With a simple DAX calculation (SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR) it is possible to add this measure. Here is the formula: Same Month Last Year = CALCULATE(Sum(Sales[SalesAmount]),SAMEPERIODLASTYEAR('Date'[Datekey])) For many users this is all they need.  The chart will update each month and they will always be able to see the last 12 months.   However, this chart will not work with date slicers.   If the client adds a date slicer to the page and selects just one month, the chart will be limited to one month. The reason the chart is limited to one month is because the date dimension relates to the sales fact table and it filters the data for the selected month. However, this is not what
Read more