Within Dynamics 365, it’s easier than you may think to create a dashboard yourself, and it’s a process that can be repeated multiple times over to ensure that you have the right data visualization for specific needs or user roles—for instance you can create a salesperson dashboard to show salespeople their open leads and opportunities and where they are in the pipeline, and you can create a sales manager dashboard to help managers see what their team has on their plates).

Power BI is an extremely powerful data visualization tool. It can handle a wide variety of reporting needs, but if you’re just starting out designing reports, or if you’ve already gotten a handle of Power BI, you may be wondering how you can use all these cool visuals and tools to create something that someone—your coworker, your manager, whomever—can get real value and insight from.

So let’s discuss some general rules that you can consider when you design in Power BI to remove barriers to use. After all, at the end of the day, we just want to make sure all our hard work goes somewhere useful.

Business Central has added a new way to analyze your data right within the pages and lists you’re currently in. Analysis mode is a toggle that provides interactive and versatile functionality to calculate, summarize, and examine data right there, without going to another page or another application (like Excel). It’s faster than running reports, and you can add multiple tabs that each represent different tasks or views of the data.