Troubleshooting Dynamic Worksheets for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

The use of Dynamic Worksheets and Pivot tables for automatically refreshing data from CRM into your Excel based reporting can be a handy and powerful tool.  Personally, I dread repopulating a static worksheet with data and find it is often easier to recreate the report instead.  Obviously this can be a time draining endeavor and the use of dynamics worksheets is a big help.

But what do you do if your dynamic worksheet looks like this?

If you are experiencing this view you are likely accessing a web facing CRM deployment and/or are not on the same domain as the CRM instance.  To resolve this you will need to install the Outlook Client for CRM which can be downloaded here. (Don’t forget you will need to roll this up to the current version.  First install roll-up 7 for a cumulative roll-up to that point and then the latest roll-up will be cumulative from 7).

The installation of the Outlook Client will tie you to the CRM instance and you will be able to download and refresh Dynamic Worksheets and Pivot tables from the CRM instance.