In Power BI, dashboards, reports, and tiles are key building blocks that present and organize data insights. A dashboard is a single-page, interactive canvas that displays a curated collection of visuals, KPIs, and data snapshots, allowing users to monitor important metrics at a glance. Reports are multi-page, detailed presentations of data, where each page can contain multiple visuals, filters, and drill-throughs for deeper analysis. Tiles are individual visual elements—such as charts, cards, or maps—that you pin from reports or datasets onto a dashboard, letting you create a customized view of the most critical information. Together, dashboards provide quick, high-level monitoring, reports support in-depth exploration, and tiles enable personalization, making it easy for organizations to track performance, analyze trends, and share insights across teams. What Does “Embedding” Mean? Embedding Power BI content means integrating dashboards, reports, or tiles directly inside anoth...

Focus View in Microsoft Dataverse (and Dynamics 365 apps built on it) is a productivity feature that helps users stay organized by highlighting the most important records and activities in one place. Instead of searching through multiple lists or dashboards, Focus View presents a curated list of prioritized items — such as leads, opportunities, or cases — based on filters, status, or due dates. This enables users to concentrate on high-value work, track progress at a glance, and act quickly on pending tasks. It’s especially useful in customer engagement scenarios, where managing time-sensitive records efficiently improves responsiveness and overall user performance. What is Focus View? Focus View is a modern productivity experience in Microsoft Dataverse (and apps like Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, or custom model-driven apps). It gives users a personalized, prioritized workspace where they can see the records that need their attention most — without navigating through multipl...

The Timeline control in Dynamics 365 Sales is a powerful component that gives users a single, consolidated view of all customer interactions related to a record, such as activities, notes, posts, emails, phone calls, appointments, and tasks. It helps sales teams track communications and history in chronological order, making it easier to understand the context of a customer relationship. With the Timeline, users can quickly add or update activities without leaving the form, apply filters to focus on specific interaction types, and view essential details at a glance. This streamlined experience enhances productivity, improves collaboration between team members, and ensures that all relevant information about an opportunity, lead, or account is easily accessible, ultimately supporting better customer engagement and informed decision-making.     What is the Timeline Control The Timeline control is a unified activity feed within Dynamics 365 Sales that displays all customer inter...

In Dynamics 365 Sales, common tasks revolve around managing the end-to-end sales process and building strong customer relationships. Sales representatives frequently create and qualify leads, convert them into opportunities, and track their progress through customizable sales stages. They manage accounts and contacts to maintain a single source of truth for customer information, ensuring every interaction is recorded and accessible. Users schedule and track activities such as calls, emails, and meetings, often using integrated tools like the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook to log communication seamlessly. Creating quotes, orders, and invoices is another essential task, helping teams move prospects toward purchase while maintaining accurate pricing and product details. Sales managers also rely on dashboards, charts, and reports to monitor pipeline health, forecast revenue, and analyze team performance. Together, these tasks support a structured approach to selling, improve collaboration, a...

In Dataverse, a view is a saved definition of how data from a table is presented to users. Views determine which columns (fields) are displayed, the order of those columns, and which records are shown through filters and sorting. They act as reusable queries that let people quickly find and work with the information they need without manually building searches every time. Dataverse provides system views (available to all users) and personal views (created by individuals for their own use). Developers and makers can customize views to include calculated or lookup fields, apply conditional formatting, and set default views for forms or apps. Well-designed views improve productivity by reducing the time spent searching for records, guiding users toward relevant data, and supporting reporting or downstream automation that depends on filtered datasets. In Dataverse , a view is a saved query that defines how records from a table are displayed in model-driven apps. Views determine which colu...

In Dataverse, a form is the user interface that allows people to view, create, and edit records in a table. Forms display fields, related data, and controls in a structured layout, making it easier to capture and manage information. They can be tailored for different audiences through multiple form types, such as main forms, quick create forms, and card form s, each optimized for specific scenarios like full record editing, quick data entry, or mobile views. Makers can customize forms by adding tabs, sections, columns, business rules, or even custom components (PCFs) to improve usability and enforce data validation. Security roles determine which forms a user can access, ensuring the right data is shown to the right people. Forms are central to model-driven apps in the Power Platform, helping organizations present clean, consistent, and business-aligned experiences while maintaining the flexibility to incorporate automation, conditional formatting, and integrations. What is a Form in D...

The Dataverse connector in a cloud flow enables seamless integration between Microsoft Power Automate and your Dataverse environment, allowing you to automate business processes and manage data efficiently. With this connector, you can create, read, update, or delete rows in Dataverse tables directly from a flow, as well as trigger flows when data changes (such as when a row is added, modified, or deleted). It supports both standard and custom tables, making it versatile for a variety of business scenarios. By leveraging the Dataverse connector, organizations can streamline operations, enforce business rules, and ensure data consistency across applications, all while reducing manual effort and improving productivity. The Dataverse connector in a cloud flow is a bridge between Microsoft Power Automate and the Dataverse data platform, enabling flows to interact with business data in a structured, scalable way. From a technical perspective, the connector exposes a set of predefined acti...

Business process flows (BPFs) in Dataverse are visual guides that help users complete work in a consistent, structured way. They break a business scenario into clear stages and steps , showing people what data to enter and which actions to take at each point. BPFs sit on top of Dataverse tables and work across model-driven apps, giving everyone the same roadmap to follow when creating or updating records such as leads, opportunities, or service cases. They can enforce required fields, branch to different paths based on conditions, and support role-based security so only the right people can access certain stages. Because they’re built with a drag-and-drop designer, BPFs don’t require coding, yet they integrate with other tools like workflows, Power Automate, and plug-ins to trigger automation behind the scenes. By guiding data entry and decision-making, business process flows improve data quality, shorten training time, and ensure that business rules are consistently applied. What Are...

Calculated and rollup columns in Dataverse are powerful tools that allow you to automate data processing inside your tables without writing code or creating complex flows. A calculated column dynamically derives its value using formulas that reference other columns, related tables, or built-in functions—for example, automatically computing a customer’s full name by concatenating first and last names, or calculating an invoice’s remaining balance. A rollup column , on the other hand, aggregates data from related rows, such as summing total revenue from all opportunities linked to an account or counting the number of active cases for a contact. Rollup columns refresh either manually or on a schedule, ensuring performance is optimized for large datasets. Together, these features simplify business logic, improve data accuracy, and keep your Dataverse records up to date without external automation or custom development. From a technical and logical perspective , calculated and rollup colu...

Low-code business logic in Dataverse allows organizations to enforce rules, automate processes, and guide users without needing complex code or development skills. Using features like business rules, calculated and rollup fields, workflows, and Power Automate , business logic can be applied directly at the data layer, ensuring consistency across all apps and integrations that use Dataverse. This approach reduces dependency on custom development, accelerates solution delivery, and makes it easier for functional consultants and business users to implement and maintain logic. By centralizing rules in Dataverse, organizations ensure data integrity, streamline operations, and enable agility while still leaving room for advanced scenarios through code-based extensions when needed. What is Low-code Business Logic in Dataverse? Low-code business logic refers to the set of tools in Dataverse that let you enforce rules, calculations, and automations without writing custom code (like plugins or ...

Classic workflows in Dataverse are an older automation feature that let you perform background or real-time actions on data without writing code. They run on the server and can be triggered automatically when a record is created, updated, assigned, or deleted, or they can be started manually by a user. With classic workflows, makers can update fields, create or delete related records, send email notifications, or even start child workflows. Although they remain supported for backward compatibility, classic workflows are gradually being replaced by Power Automate cloud flows , which provide a richer set of connectors, better scalability, and a modern design experience. For new solutions, Microsoft recommends using Power Automate or business rules instead of creating new classic workflows, reserving them mainly for maintaining existing legacy logic inside Dataverse environments. What are Classic Workflows? Classic workflows in Dataverse (formerly in Dynamics 365 and CRM) are one of the e...

In Microsoft Dataverse, formula columns let you create real-time, calculated values without writing server-side code. They use Power Fx—the same low-code expression language as Power Apps—so you can reference other columns, related tables, or built-in functions to derive results on the fly. Formula columns are evaluated automatically whenever source data changes, ensuring the value shown is always up to date without storing redundant data. They’re ideal for lightweight business logic, such as combining first and last names, calculating discounts, determining due dates, or formatting text for display. Because the logic runs at the data layer, the same calculation is consistently applied across all apps, flows, and integrations consuming that table, improving maintainability and reducing errors. A formula column in Microsoft Dataverse is a special type of column that calculates its value dynamically, using Power Fx expressions. It’s designed for scenarios where you want a value to be a...

Duplicate detection in Dynamics 365 is a feature that helps maintain clean and accurate data by identifying and preventing duplicate records from being created. It works by using duplicate detection rules, where administrators define which fields should be compared (like email, phone number, or account name) to check for possible duplicates. When a user tries to create or update a record, Dynamics 365 evaluates it against existing records and displays a warning if a potential duplicate is found. This ensures data quality, avoids confusion in customer interactions, and supports better reporting and decision-making by keeping the Dataverse environment consistent and reliable. Technically, duplicate detection in Dynamics 365 is a rules-based validation system built into Dataverse that enforces data quality, prevents redundant records, and supports reliable integrations. Duplicate Detection Rules Configured at the entity (table) level in Dataverse. Rules define which fields to compare (e.g...