External applications
Because Dynamics NAV queries can be published as web services, they can be accessed by absolutely any application that can consume OData web services. It can be an external application developed by you for the only purpose of reading Dynamics NAV data or it can be a commonly used application that supports OData web services.
If you are integrating NAV with an external app via web services, it's always recommended not to expose directly the NAV web services but use a custom WS that talks with NAV (via standard web services exposed as described) and the external system.
In this section we will see how to use Dynamics NAV queries in Microsoft Office Excel.
Excel and PowerPivot
Among all the applications that are out there, an extensively used one is probably Microsoft Office Excel. There is a free add-in for Excel called PowerPivot that can consume OData web services.
We can do that as follows:
- If you're using Excel 2013, you can enable the PowerPivot...