Congrats! You've put the time, effort, and money into implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and are already seeing the benefits the cloud software provides to your organization. Processes are documented and enforced better and best practices are in place, thereby helping to increase win-rates and decrease on-boarding time for new staff. And thanks to the integrations with other business software, your customer data is now all accessible in one easy to use system.

But does having all this data in one place have you itching for more analytics beyond the powerful charts, dashboards, and reports native to CRM? Microsoft's PowerBI is the fix you need! This powerful business intelligence tool gives you the ability to further transform and analyze the data in your CRM system via dashboards and reports.

In today's blog, we will walk you through the steps you need to get started analyzing your CRM data in PowerBI!

To connect PowerBI to your CRM data you have two options. You can either use an existing content pack or use the PowerBI desktop to configure your own data source, data set, reports, and dashboards which can then be published as a custom content pack within your organization. Content packs are packages with a pre-defined data source, data set, reports, and dashboards. They are easy to configure, and you don't need any reporting know-how to do it!

PowerBI desktop gives report builders and business analysts freedom to define their own data set and apply necessary transformations for custom reporting. However, this tool is more technical – so today's blog will only cover the configuration of a content pack in PowerBI.

How to connect PowerBI to CRM Online data using a content pack.

1. In the PowerBI Web App welcome screen, under the heading Content Pack Library, click Get in the Services tile.

2. Select your desired content pack from the available options. Microsoft has two content packs published for CRM Online under the Service tab; Sales Manager and Service Manager.

3. Enter your CRM Online URL in the format of https://myorganization.crm.dynamics.com and click Next.

4. In the next screen, select oAuth2 as your authentication method by selecting it from the dropdown and then click Sign In.

5. Enter your CRM Online credentials in the pop-up window to allow PowerBI to access your CRM data.

Voila! You will now be automatically brought to a PowerBI Dashboard included as part of that content pack. During the next several minutes, you won't see any data here as PowerBI downloads the data from CRM, but don't fret, data is on its way!

If you don't want to use Microsoft content packs, you can alternatively click Get in the My Organization tile in Step 1 to access any content packs that have been published by other users in your organization. These content packs might include your organization's custom fields and custom data types.

That's all for the blog today. Want to learn more about PowerBI and Dynamics CRM? Check out our FREE Webinar on Demand, Power BI Showcase. And make sure you sign up for our next webinar, How PowerObjects Uses Dynamics CRM for Lead Gen, to get an exclusive look into how we use our CRM data to achieve results.

Happy CRM'ing!