Charting CRM Data Across Categories

You can use the CRM 4.0 Report Writer to easily build graphical summaries of your Dynamics CRM data across categories: accounts by owner or territory, sales by product or pipeline stage, etc.

In my case, however, this only seemed “easy” once I understood how the report writer works! (funny how often it works like that)

In this new “Ten-Minute Tips” format, I’m going to depart from my usual detailed (a.k.a. long!) step by step explanations and try to boil it down to a single key step of the process.

So, assuming you understand the basics of how to create and save reports, if you want to build charts, you need to understand the innocently-named “Lay Out Fields” step of the Report Wizard. I’ll illustrate with a report that displays a bar chart of estimated revenue (using the Opportunity entity). I want to see a “sales pipeline”, and in the example I use the built-in “Status Reason” attribute for the stages of a sales process.  

The notes in this figure summarize this as pithily as I’m capable of:

For more detail…

Here’s the Video

My son thinks this ten-minute video is the third-geekiest ever posted to YouTube, but if you need to create charts like this, you might find it useful:

If you are reading this and had planned on attending the Dynamics CRM User Group Meeting on 2/26…I apologize. We had an unforutunate perfoect storm of server and connectivity problems, and I felt terrible about having to cancel at the last minute. But Live Meeting sessions without the Live Meeting part are inherently boring.

Anyway, I (finally!) recorded a version of what I’d planned on presenting at the meeting. I’ve written about this a couple of times, so for this post I’ll just provide a few comments here, but mainly link to the recordings.

I created this in a number of parts, rather than one monolithic file.

So here, without further ado, is the introduction. This is a narrated slide presentation:  Internet Marketing in Dynamics CRM Online – Introduction

The next part is a demonstration: how you create Lead Capture pages, and how the results come into CRM when a user fills out one of your forms: Internet Marketing in Dynamics CRM Online – Demo, Part 1

The next part is a demonstration also. What this one focuses in on is one of the most important bits: what can you do with these Internet Leads after they’re imported into CRM. In my view, this is where the power of this approach really becomes apparent: Internet Marketing in Dynamics CRM Online – Demonstration, Part 2 (not quite ready for posting yet…)