Whenever I give an overview presentation of Dynamics AX to new customers or prospects, I always start off with a general foundation review – sometimes called a “Cooking Demo” paying respect to Julia Childs who always had everything prepared beforehand.  Usually this is also accompanied by a PowerPoint with all of the scenarios laid out in it for reference.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to take this to the next level, and rather than hand out PowerPoint decks, format the cooking demo into a book, and give it to people during the demonstration as a reference that they will put on their bookshelf rather than loose within the other pile of PowerPoints that they receive… and also I worked out that this is less expensive (even though the quality is better) than printing out the PowerPoints.

I also decided to make it available to everyone as a quick reference on what you can do with Dynamics AX and posted it to Amazon at the lowest possible price that Amazon would allow after they take their cut on the royalties and also print the book.

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Once a PowerView Dashboard is hosted within the PowerPivot Gallery, there is one cool feature that you can take advantage of which allows you to export any of the dashboards to PowerPoint and then have a live and interactive version of the dashboard as a PowerPoint slide.

NOTE: This is part of the Using PowerPivot to Analyze Your Dynamics AX Data blog series where we show how PowerPivot can assist you with advanced data analysis and reporting, making those extracts from Dynamics AX to Excel even more valuable. If you want to see all of the other posts in this series, click here.

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There are a number of different types of columns types that you can define within the PowerPivot manager, which act differently based depending on where they are used. One example are the Image column types. If you have a column that links to an image file then you can use it within your dashboards to spice things up a little.

NOTE: This is part of the Using PowerPivot to Analyze Your Dynamics AX Data blog series where we show how PowerPivot can assist you with advanced data analysis and reporting, making those extracts from Dynamics AX to Excel even more valuable. If you want to see all of the other posts in this series, click here.

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Just as you can do within Excel, you can also use any of the built in functions within the Data Model designer. This allows you to perform string and date manipulation as you create new column definitions, giving you more reporting options than are available within the default tables.

NOTE: This is part of the Using PowerPivot to Analyze Your Dynamics AX Data blog series where we show how PowerPivot can assist you with advanced data analysis and reporting, making those extracts from Dynamics AX to Excel even more valuable. If you want to see all of the other posts in this series, click here.

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PowerPivot has another great feature that allows you to create relationships between tables so that you can report off both tables within the same query.

NOTE: This is part of the Using PowerPivot to Analyze Your Dynamics AX Data blog series where we show how PowerPivot can assist you with advanced data analysis and reporting, making those extracts from Dynamics AX to Excel even more valuable. If you want to see all of the other posts in this series, click here.

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Where PowerPivot starts to really outshine the simple Pivot Tables is in the feature that allows you to create new columns through the PowerPivot Manager. You can then filter, and report off the results as if it were a normal field in the system.

NOTE: This is part of the Using PowerPivot to Analyze Your Dynamics AX Data blog series where we show how PowerPivot can assist you with advanced data analysis and reporting, making those extracts from Dynamics AX to Excel even more valuable. If you want to see all of the other posts in this series, click here.

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