Now we’ll paste in the OData URL that we copied from the Developer Resources page in CRM Online earlier. Under Get External Data, choose the From Other Sources – From OData Feed option. Next we’ll open a new Excel workbook and navigate to the Power Query tab on the Ribbon. You can grab this from the Settings – Customizations – Developer Resources menu as shown below. Then you’ll need to acquire the OData endpoint URL for your CRM Online organization. Connecting to CRM Online from Excelįirst you’ll need to download the Power Query component and install it as an add-on to Excel 2013. On the client side, however, there is now an updated version of Power Query Preview for Excel 2013 that gives us the possibility to finally connect to a CRM Online OData feed directly. Hey, that last part sounds great! So, what does it mean in practice for us CRM people? Well, the Power BI Preview subscription still doesn’t provide the option to provision a CRM Online instance for the same Office 365 instance, so there’s not that much new things visible on the cloud side yet if you spin up a preview org. “Power Query can now connect to more data sources: The latest December 2013 Update for Power BI announcement mentions the following enhancements:
To get an understanding of the features included or under development, I encourage you to watch this Power BI demo from WPC 2013, which definitely deserves the Coolest Tech Demo of 2013 trophy if you ask me. The Power BI umbrella also covers client side components, including Power Pivot (now spelled as two separate words apparently) and Power Query, that bring new capabilities to Excel.
Last summer Microsoft announced the preview program for Power BI, their cloud based business intelligence suite, containing tools for publishing reports in Office 365. There is a workaround that you could apply if you’ve got the CRM Outlook client installed on the same machine, as described in this video by Ed Martinez, but in general using PowerPivot for CRM Online reporting has been quite restricted. The reason behind the error messages is that Excel and PowerPivot have not been able to support the authentication mechanism required for accessing the CRM Online OData feed. “We can’t use the data from this feed.” Bummer. Unfortunately, if you try to enter the CRM Online OData URL as a feed link, you’ll get this error message: Knowing that Dynamics CRM 20 both provide an OData endpoint, this would seem like a great option for retrieving data from a CRM Online based system for reporting purposes, since direct database connections aren’t available in the cloud. The latest version of Excel contains a Get External Data menu option for linking the workbook to an OData data feed.
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