Create a Power BI Report with Finance and Operations Apps Data - Step-by-Step Guide

Create a Power BI report with Finance and Operations apps data

To create a report, you will need to use a Finance and Operations development environment, Visual Studio, and either Power BI Online or Power BI Desktop. Power BI uses the Open Data Protocol (OData) endpoints that are available from Finance and Operations entities. To connect to Dynamics 365 Unified Operations data, you can connect using an OData feed in Power BI. You can then select the database and entities that you want to load.

When you have the data loaded, you can drag fields to the canvas to manipulate the data. You can select from a variety of visualizations to explore data, create calculations, and combine multiple aggregate measurements. After the report is finished, you can then push the report to your production environment.

Modify a Power BI report

Unlike SSRS reports, which require multiple reports to see different views of the same data, Power BI can be used for quick and simple manipulation of how your data is viewed. You can adjust existing reports to filter data as you need it.

Pin Power BI reports to workspaces

Microsoft Dynamics AX platform update 1 (May 2016) introduced the capability to pin Power BI reports to workspaces. Power BI reports can be added to any workspace that contains a Links section. In other words, the reports can be added to most of the out-of-box workspaces that are included in the product. To enable Power BI reports and tiles, you must configure Power BI to work with the application. This one-time operation must be completed by an administrator of the environment.

For instructions, see Configure Power BI integration for workspaces.

After you've configured Power BI to work with the application, open the Ledger budgets and forecasts workspace in the client. In the workspace, click the Options tab. Notice that this tab contains buttons to open the (Power BI) tile catalog and the (Power BI) report catalog. Click Open report catalog. A dialog box that contains a list of reports appears. The list of reports comes from the reports that you have in your Power BI account. If you open PowerBI.com in a browser, you will see that the same list of reports is used across your Power BI dashboards. Select some reports, as shown in the following illustration, and then click OK to continue.

Next, scroll to the bottom of the Links section in the workspace. Notice that a new section for Power BI reports has been added to your links.