Have you ever wanted to have the same data that you see in Smartlists within GP already in an Excel form so that you didn’t have to wait for the Smartlist to export to Excel or that users that aren’t in GP can see the data. Well since version GP 2010 Microsoft has introduced Excel Reports. Excel Reports provided this ability to view GP data in Excel and can be accessed by anyone that has security to view the data, the best thing is that it doesn’t take a GP user to do so.
Microsoft has included several default Excel Reports, but users can create other Excel reports as well just by using the data connections that get deployed with Excel reporting or by creating their own data connections.
In this article I’ll be showing you how to deploy the default reports that come with Dynamics GP. The version I’m showing here is GP 2013 R2. In previous versions it is a little bit different.
You will need access to the System area of GP, if you don’t see that options available then your GP security will prevent you from performing these steps.
To deploy the reports you need to open then Reporting Tools Setup window (Tools>>Setup>>System>>Reporting Tools Setup). When this screen first opens it will possibly try to connect to your SSRS deployment as well if you have one setup. Once the screen is open you will want to make sure to select the “Excel Reports” option.
Most companies are going to want to deploy to a Network Share as shown in the screen shot but there are other options available.
For the Reports Directory you will want to use a Network Share that all of the users that need access to these files can get to. You can use the folder icon to browse out to that location. I would recommend always using the UNC path rather than a mapped drive in case not all users have the same mapped drive on their machine.
You can also setup a User level folder, but in my example I have left that blank as all users wil access the main reports directory.
The final step is to select the companies that you wish to deploy the Excel reports for. In my example I only have the Fabrikam, Inc demo so I only see this one company. Check the boxes of the companies you want to deploy the reports for (as shown in the screenshot above). Once selected click on the “Deploy Reports” button.
A dialog will be displayed showing the progress of the deployment:
Once the deployment is complete, the Reporting Tools setup window will look like the screenshot above and have green checkmarks next to the deployed companies at the bottom of the screen.
You can now browse out to your file location and see that it made a folder for each company and within each company there are folders for different types of data that you wish to view. I would recommend setting this entire share to “Read-Only” access so that these master copies do not get changed. If a user wished they can do a “Save As” in Excel and save to any other location and the report will still refresh with GP data.
There is additional setup that is required on the SQL side that I don’t cover in this article. Please talk with your IT staff or your Dynamics GP partner to make sure that SQL security is turned on for your Active Directory user to be able to view the data in the SQL databases.
