In the event you are not aware, you can obtain a preview instance of Power BI for free. When you go to the Power BI sign-up page it will ask for a work or school email address. The sign-up process will complain if you try to use a personal email address. In the event you don’t want to use your work address, you can spin up a CRM trial instance and use that email address to sign up. That is the approach I took and it worked well. The nice thing about that approach is that you can connect Power BI to your trial CRM instance with just a few clicks. Let’s take a look.
After signing in to Power BI you’ll see Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the left navigation window. When you select it a Connect button will appear.
Select the Connect button and you will be asked to enter your Dynamics CRM OData Service URL which can be found in CRM under Settings, Customizations, Developer Resources.
Copy and paste the OData URL into the Power BI field and select Next.
You’ll be presented with sign-in options. Select oAuth2 from the list and Power BI will connect to CRM. The initial data load will take several minutes but once complete you will see a Dashboard, Reports and Datasets section.
You are now ready to begin exploring Power BI. Check out this Power BI getting started article for a host of information to include working with Datasets to create charts (drag and drop), creating reports and dashboards, sharing dashboards and a whole lot more.
You can also download and try out the Power BI for Mobile App, Power BI Designer Preview and Analysis Services Connector Preview.
Keep an eye out for future articles as I begin exploring all that Power BI has to offer for Microsoft Dynamics CRM analytics.
