Dashboard and Chart in Dynamics CRM 2011 – Part 2

Vincent Zhong, 07 May 2012

In my previous blog post, I talked about how to create a System Charts and Dashboards. I will talk about the Personal Charts and Dashboards now.

Here is some recap from last blog post, only users who have System Administrator or System Customizer security roles can create System Charts and Dashboards, and once they have been created, all users can see them. On the other hand, all users can create their own Personal Charts and Dashboard, but only themselves can see them.

Next I will show you how to create Personal Chart. Create Personal Chart is easier and more straight forward, as you don’t need to go into the Customization page. I will use entity Account as example. First we click “Sales -> Accounts”, we will see a list of accounts, like this:
 

Then on the top Ribbon menu, we click “Charts -> New Chart”:
 

We will come to the Chart designer page. On top of the page, you can choose the type of chart, and then you can name your chart, and choose what data you want it to show. 
 

Creating Personal Dashboard is even simpler. The very first page you will see when you log into CRM 2011 is the Dashboard page. Like the one below:
 

You can click the “New” button to create a new Dashboard, but the Dashboard you created here will only be available to yourself. If your Dashboard is intended to be viewed by multiple people, you should create a System Dashboard. After you click the “New” button, you will see the exact same page as you saw for creating a System Dashboard.

You can select the type of Dashboard, and then click “Create”. You will come to the Dashboard design page.
 

Depending on the layout you chose, you might see a slightly different screen, but the way to add component into Dashboard is the same. You can insert 4 types of components into Dashboard, which are Charts, Lists, IFrames and Web Resources. I will show you how to add Chart into Dashboard as example.

First, you click the Chart icon, the small one on the dashboard or the big one on the top. Then you can select the Entity and the Charts for that Entity to show in this Dashboard.

Once you name your Dashboard, and click OK, the Chart will be added in this Dashboard.
 

Now let have a look, now go back to your CRM 2011 Dashboard page, select the Dashboard we just created.
 

You will see the Dashboard with only one Chart is displayed below:
 

Now I have showed you the difference between System Charts and Dashboard and Personal ones, and showed you how to create them. You should be able to play around with them and enjoy the power of those tools come with Dynamics CRM 2011