Dynamics 365 Reporting Tools

For any organization, reports are an integral part to helping your team’s function whether it’s to pass information to your clientele or to discover realities.

There are many reporting tools for Dynamics 365. Some of the most common tools are:

• The built-in Report Wizard in Dynamics 365
• SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and the Dynamics 365 Report Authoring Extension
• Flow
• Power BI

Which tool should you use? Well, that entirely depends on your use case. Below is an outline with a few of the top benefits and limitations of each:

Report Wizard in Dynamics 365

• Easy for a power user to create and configure
• Limited to connecting 2 relational datasets (i.e. a parent and child entity)
• Limited to a tabular or matrix format
• Can easily configure them to run from a single record or multiple
• Security is based on the Dynamics 365 users security role(s)
• Unable to schedule them on a recurring basis out of the box in Dynamics 365 online

SSDT with the Dynamics 365 Report Authoring Extension

• A power user can create these, but it may require a bit of upfront training
• Can connect more than 2 data sets using FetchXML
• Very flexible on how the report is formatted
  • Can display in a common tabular or matrix format
  • Can add images
  • Can add headers and footers
  • Can display multiple child tables (with the help of a sub report)
• Can add prompts (e.g. a date range, a team/user) to help end users running the report to filter the data
• Can add/remove sorting features
• Can adjust the width so that it is formatted properly for your export format of choice (Word, PDF, Excel, etc)
• Can import to Dynamics 365 which will then behave similar to one that was developed using the Dynamics 365 report wizard tool:

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