Using PowerBI to Analyze Dynamics AX Data
Everyone has used Pivot Tables within Excel at one point in time to create simple reports against Dynamics AX, and some of you may have also used Power Pivot to create more elaborate dashboards and charts. Recently Microsoft extended out the query and reporting capabilities within Excel with the Power BI suite. In addition to extending the Power Pivot capabilities, they also added three more tools called Power Query, Power View & Power Map, and that means that you have a whole new set of reporting options.
In this presentation we will show you how you can use all of the Power BI tools to analyze your Dynamics AX data.
The topics that are described within this series are:
- Mapping your data within Excel through PowerView
- Using PowerQuery to Clean up Your Data
- Using PowerMap to Build Even Better Map Visualizations
- Using different Visualizations within PowerMap
- Using PowerQuery to Merge Datasets
- Flattening Maps
- Adding Labels to the Maps
Bonus Book Content
- Using PowerQuery to Integrate External Data (Bonus Book Content)
PowerBI marries a number of useful analytics tools together to help you analyze your data, and to be able to analyze your data geographically is one of the cooler features.
After you have mastered the basics of the PowerBI suite though you can start using some of the other features such as:
- Creating multiple layers within PowerMap to merge data
- Using PowerQuery to access information from web sites and XML feeds
- Create labels and information panels in your PowerMaps
- Create tours that animate your maps through storyboards
There is so much that you can do with PowerBI, try it out.
Extending Dynamics AX 
Hi, when you say you can use all the Power BI tools to analyze AX data, can you please explain how you would use the O365 Power BI site, Q&A and the mobile apps to analyze AX data. Specifically can you simply query AX cubes and automatically refresh the data in O365? Can you also maintain the AX security model in O365? Are all the HTML5 visualizations supported? Thanks Xay
Xay, Microsoft are working on the refreshing of the data from O365 as we speak. There is a tool called the Data Management Gateway that does part of the work, because it allows you to create a secure tunnel from PowerBI to your ERP system, allowing for real time queries from O365 using OData queries… If you create a query using that OData connection then the PowerBI and Q&A should be real-time(ish) as I understand it… I still need to test it to be completely certain though. Murray.