For most of Dynamics 365’s life, “show me the pipeline” meant a grid — honest, sortable, and about as inspiring as a tax form. The pipeline view on opportunities changed that: metrics on top, an interactive chart in the middle, the working grid below, all on one screen and all filtered together. If your sales team still opens Excel to “see” their pipeline, this is the page to show them.
One screen, three layers
The top strip is the scoreboard — pipeline value, deal count, won and lost this period:
Below it, the Deal tracker plots every open deal as a bubble: horizontal position is the estimated close date, size is the deal value, and color grades the deal. The picture answers questions a grid makes you work for. Bubbles bunched short of the quarter line? A crowded closing month. A big bubble far right with a poor grade? A large deal drifting. Nothing in the current month at all? The gap the forecast meeting should be about. Click any bubble and an editing panel opens right there — adjust the close date or amount without ever leaving the view.
The funnel, for stage health
The second tab flips the same deals into a sales funnel by pipeline phase — Qualify, Develop, Propose, Close — weighted by estimated revenue. Its diagnostic value is shape: a funnel that is all Qualify means the team is optimistic at intake and stalling in the middle; a funnel that is all Close means nobody has fed the top in months and next quarter will hurt. Ten seconds of looking replaces a pivot table.
Working the list without losing the picture
The grid at the bottom is a full working grid — sort, edit inline, open records — and it stays in sync with the visuals above. Because the whole page respects the view selector, your personal views work here too: switch to “My deals closing this quarter” and the chart, funnel and metrics all recompute for exactly that slice. The view toggle in the corner (Combo, chart-only, grid-only) lets each rep pick their own default, and everything stays one click from the classic read-only grid via Show As if you need it.
Making it the habit
Two suggestions from watching teams adopt this. First, make pipeline view the opportunity entity’s default (an admin setting) — defaults decide behavior, and a team that lands on the picture every morning starts managing the picture. Second, run your weekly pipeline review directly on this screen instead of a slide export: when the close date is wrong, fix it in the meeting, in the bubble’s edit panel, and the forecast is clean before the meeting ends. The report that updates itself is the one that finally kills the spreadsheet.
