Creating Power BI Drill Throughs into Dynamics

We all know that we can add Power BI tiles within Dynamics that will open up Power BI reports, but did you know that you can also link Dynamics workspaces and forms to Power BI tiles so that you can drill into Dynamics from Power BI.

You probably didn’t so in this walkthrough we will show how you can do just that.

How to do it…

Step 1: Click on the … link

To start off hover over the Power BI tile that you want to link back to Dynamics and you will notice that some extra icons show up in the header of the tile. Click on the … link.

Step 2: Click on the pencil icon

This will open up some extra options for the tile. What we want to do here is edit some of the interaction information, so we will want to click on the Pencil icon.

This will open up the Tile Details form with some additional options that we can change just for the tile.

Step 3: Check the Set custom link flag

Now we will want to tell Power BI that whenever anyone clicks on the tile that we would like it to go to a different web page. To do this we will check the Set custom link flag.

Step 4: Get the URL

Now we will need to get the URL that we want to link the tile to. To do this we will open up Dynamics and find the workspace that we want to link to and then copy the URL.

Step 5: Set the Custom URL

Now paste the URL for Dynamics into the URL field and then click on the Apply button to confirm the change.

How it works…

Now we can return back to our dashboard and click on the tile that we just redirected.

And that will open up Dynamics for us and go straight to the workspace that we linked to it.

Review

How cool is that.

Now when you find some squirrelly data within your Power BI dashboards, you can immediately go back to Dynamics and research the problem a little more.

About the Author

Murray Fife is a Technical Solution Professional at Microsoft and an Author of over 25 books on Microsoft Dynamics AX including the Bare Bones Configuration Guide series of over 15 books which step the user through the setup of initial Dynamics AX instance, then through the Financial modules and then through the configuration of the more specialized modules like production, service management, and project accounting. You can find all of his books on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/author/murrayfife.

Murray is also the curator of the Dynamics AX Companions (www.dynamicsaxcompanions.com) site which he built from the ground up as a resource for all of the Dynamics AX community where you can find walkthroughs and blueprints that he created since first being introduced to the Dynamics AX product.

Throughout his 25+ years of experience in the software industry he has worked in many different roles during his career, including as a developer, an implementation consultant, a trainer and a demo guy within the partner channel which gives him a great understanding of the requirements for both customers and partner’s perspective.

For more information on Murray, here is his contact information:

Email:     mufife@microsoft.com
Twitter:     @murrayfife
Facebook:     facebook.com/murraycfife
Google:     google.com/+murrayfife
LinkedIn:     linkedin.com/in/murrayfife
Blog:     atinkerersnotebook.com
Docs:     docs.com/mufife
Amazon:     amazon.com/author/murrayfife