Among the best attended presentations at Microsoft Convergence 2013 were a pair of sessions entitled “Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP & Microsoft Excel,” delivered by Mark Polino and Jared Hall. These were based on Mark Polino’s new book with a similar title, Building Dashboards with Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 and Excel 2013.
Mark Polino is a Microsoft MVP for Dynamics GP (www.mig.com/DynamicsGP) and a longtime blogger about all things GP. His book details how to use Microsoft Excel to build a refreshable dashboard that displays information from Microsoft GP in an easily digestible overview. A dashboard presents financial information that is up-to-date and easy to understand, and everyone seems to want one nowadays. Hence the popularity of Polino’s Convergence sessions.
The book is a step-by-step walkthrough, and when you’ve completed that walk, you’ll have created a sample dashboard that looks like this:
But the book also covers how to build a dashboard that is unique to a specific user and/or organization’s needs.
According to the book’s preface, it is intended for “the person that the CFO keeps asking about building a dashboard. It’s for the controller, the analyst, or the senior accountant who knows there is a treasure of information hiding in Dynamics GP, if they can just get at it. It’s for the Excel power user who is tired of being held back by exporting data from GP and rebuilding information every month.”
If that sounds like you, better pick up a copy of the book. Microsoft Dynamics GP 2013 holds a wealth of information, and Microsoft Excel 2013 is a terrific tool for extracting that information and presenting it in a way that helps companies to make better, faster, and smarter decisions.
MIG & Co. is a professional consulting firm that specializes in the implementation of business management software solutions, including Microsoft Dynamics GP, SL, and CRM. We automate business processes to ensure that our customers work efficiently.