Microsoft Dynamics CRM comes with many bells and whistles that just aren’t utilized. Even when you first open your CRM Online instance, you are immediately taken to the Dashboards area. We have numerous clients who wish to create new charts and dashboards for both management and users. However, sometimes the data they are looking for is already available–if you know how to get to it.
So what exactly are we missing here? Drill-downs and Grid Views. So many times management wants to see data in a chart that is already available if they drill down into a top level chart. Let’s take a look at the basic, out-of-the-box funnel chart that comes in the standard CRM online implementation.
This funnel chart encompasses all of the open opportunities in CRM. Looking at the legend, you can see what stages are being displayed and the dollar amounts for each.
But what if we want to look at these by Estimated Close Date? No need to create a new chart for the dashboard. We can just drill down to that level.
If we click anywhere on the chart, we will see a small box which allows us to select a drill-down field as well as a chart type for displaying the new data.
Please keep in mind that we clicked on the “Develop” section of the funnel chart. So our drill-down chart will consist of only that data.
In this example, I have selected Estimated Close Date. This will drill down into the data and show me my opportunities in a new chart based on the Month of the Estimated Close Date.
You can now see the open Opportunities in the “Develop” stage by Month of the Estimated Close Date. This offers a better picture into your funnel and the time-frame for your pipeline.
We can now take this one step farther and drill-down into a particular month’s data and show us the opportunities by Owner. We once again click on a bar of the chart, choose our drill-down field and chart type and click the blue arrow to see our new chart.
Being that this is sample data, we only see one owner within that Month. But you get the idea.
And now, if we want to actually see the data behind the chart, we can click on the Grid View icon in the upper right-hand corner. This will give us our list of records related to the chart. Keep in mind that you can do this at any time while drilling down.
After clicking the Grid View icon, we now see a list of the records associated to our chart on the left as well as the chart to the right of the list. This actually opens up in a new screen or tab allowing you to close and go back to your chart in your dashboard.
One final thing that is sometimes overlooked is the navigation buttons at the bottom of each chart. These allow you to navigate back to the last drill-down chart or you can choose to go “Home” to the original chart in the dashboard.
So before you start creating new charts and dashboards, see if you can Drill-Down to get the data you need.
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by Beringer Associates
Unfortunately, when drilling down in a chart from a dashboard, you cannot select related entity fields. You are correct that this can only be done from the charts visible from the views.
When creating a chart within the view you can create a chart with entity fields from related records. For example, an Opportunities view where Opportunities are related to accounts, where account fields are in the view and you can drill down in the chart using the account fields. However, when the chart is loaded in a dashboard, you cannot drill down using fields in the view. The only fields available are those in the primary entity the view is tied to (Opportunities in this case). Any way around this?