Microsoft recently announced the CRM Online Spring Release ‘15 and subsequently lifted the NDA around the release and therefore it’s time to start posting about all the great new features coming!
This post will cover the new Immersive Excel feature that Microsoft is rolling out.
What is it?
Immersive Excel is Microsoft’s new way to have a richer Microsoft Excel experience directly in Dynamics CRM. You’re no longer required to export your data to Excel to be able to perform more complex analysis on it (though this functionality still remains). You can now perform this analysis directly within Dynamics CRM.
What can it do?:
So what can the new Immersive Excel feature within Dynamics CRM do? How close to actual Excel do I get when I use it? Well the answer is that Immersive Excel is actually using Excel Online from within the CRM browser window. Therefore anything you can do with Excel Online, you can do with Immersive Excel.
This includes the ability to work with Excel Formulas directly from your list of CRM data, without leaving CRM. You can calculate what the Commission you could make for your Opportunities, by multiplying the revenue by 10%, if the probability is at least 90%.
You can make updates to records which honor field validation (e.g., you cannot enter a string into a date field, you can only select from the available option set values, min and max values, etc.), and then click on Save Changes to CRM. Or you can simply return back to the CRM list without saving your changes. Immersive Excel allows you to change multiple records quickly acting like an editable grid. However, you must click the button to save the changes before the records are updated.
You currently cannot do perform a Save As to save an Excel Doc (due to technical limitations) but you can copy/paste from the embedded Immersive Excel page to another Excel document. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future release.
Requirements
In order to make use of this new functionality, the following requirements must be met:
- CRM Online (currently we are unaware of any plans to bring this to OnPrem)
- Separate O365 License required (Online version of Office)
- Export to Excel Security Role Privilege
- Available in the Web Client only (not available for the phone, tablet, or Outlook clients yet)
Miscellaneous and Summary:
Immersive Excel is a neat new tool that will provide CRM users with an additional option to perform some more ad-hoc quick queries, reports, dashboards to analyze data on the fly.
Note that this functionality is recommended purely for “on the fly” analytics, and not for someone to save the Excel file locally. Use Export to Excel for that functionality.
After 5 minutes, the file is regenerated per view per user. There is an indicator in the top right of the page shows when the file was generated. Take note of this time as Microsoft doesn’t want to bombard the servers with constant regeneration, but they also don’t want the data to become stale. Therefore if you’re using this functionality to make changes to records, remember to save early and often to make sure none of your changes are lost.
Also note that the import of the data from Excel Online will take time. A data import async job is kicked off to perform this functionality that you can monitor to see when it completes.
I hope you’re as excited about this functionality as we are, and hope you’re able to get your hands on it soon!