D365FO New User Orientation | Beyond the Dashboard

This is part of our ongoing series for Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations New User Orientation

Our first article in this series D365FO New User Orientation | A First Look discussed the Dashboard, Navigation Pane, Keyboard Shortcuts, and a few other items. This blog is focused on things beyond the Dashboard.

Action Bar

Almost every page in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365FO) has an action bar directly below the navigation bar. The action bar is page specific and different tabs and buttons are available on each page. It is very similar to the ribbon found in Word and Excel.

When looking at the action bar, words that are bold will be labels that when clicked on offer more groups and action buttons and links to click on. Non-bold words in the action bar are action buttons and do not expand.

The left side of the action bar generally starts with buttons such as Save, Edit, Delete and New. If Edit is visible, Save is generally not an option and vice versa.

The magnify glass (labelled as 1 in the screenshot above) at the end of the action buttons and action tab labels (Options is generally the last one listed) is a search function for within the action bar. Where the Navigation Search looks for pages and workspaces, the Action Search looks for commands within the specific page’s action bar. For example, if you are on a purchase order and cannot remember where you go to confirm the purchase order, you can start to type ‘Confirm’ in the action search and it will tell you which label and group the command is in. Clicking on the suggestion will activate the command/action.

On the right side of the action bar you will find the following common buttons:

2. PowerApps

• Ability to insert and have PowerApps within D365FO.

3. Open in Microsoft Office

• Open in Excel
  • If available, this will give you a list of templates available to work in Excel and then publish back into D365FO.
• Export to Excel
  • If available, this will give you a list of templates available to export static data to Excel. The ability to publish back into D365FO is not available with Export to Excel.

4. Attachments

• Tells you how many attachments are on the specific record you are on.
• Click to access the attachments.

5. Refresh

• Refreshes the screen.

6. Open in New Window

• Opens the current page in a new window. Unfortunately, the window can close automatically if you move to another area of D365FO on your main tab. As a result, it is easier to duplicate your browser tab and use that as your second window. You can have many browser tabs open with D365FO.

Saving

D365FO is setup to generally save as data is entered. This means in most cases you can leave a page in D365FO and any information you have entered will be automatically saved.  In cases where it is not automatically saved, a message will pop up and ask if you wish to save changes before closing.

Task Messages

Task messages tied to a D365FO task you are performing generally come in three colours – Blue, Yellow and Red.

1. Blue

• Blue messages let you know your transaction has been successfully completed.

2. Yellow

• Yellow messages are typically warnings letting you know such things as a mandatory field still needs to be populated or has incorrect information and you cannot proceed until populated correctly. These yellow messages generally pop up when you click Save or go to leave a page.
  • If you want the record to be saved, you must fix the warning message.
  • If you do not want the system to save the new record or be updated with the new information, press the Esc key and the system will ask you if you wish to save your changes before closing. If you select No, the new record will not be created or the old record will not be updated, depending on the scenario.
• Yellow messages can also give a warning based on configuration settings but still allow you to proceed with the process.

3. Red

• Red messages generally happen when posting or attempting to complete a transaction that has failed to successfully complete due to failing validation or incomplete information or setup. Red messages must be resolved before the transaction can be completed.

Personalization

Most pages in D365FO allow for each user to make personalization’s to the page. Of course, this is subject to administrative setup by your company on whether individual personalization’s are allowed or must be done by an administrator.

If your company allows for individual personalization’s, you can access this either by right clicking on the area of the page you wish to personalize and then clicking ‘Personalize’ or by going to the Options tab on the action bar of the page you are on.

With personalization you can:

• Add available fields to the page
• Move fields on the page
• Skip fields in tab sequence
• Hide and unhide fields
• Add a page to a workspace
  • Tile – Including count if desired
  • List
  • Link
• Set a page as always open in Edit

Filtering

On most list pages you have the ability to filter on a specific column and sort in ascending or descending order on a specific column.

Filtering options include:

• Is exactly
• Is not
• Contains
• Does not contain
• Begins with
• Is one of
  • A nice feature of ‘Is one of’ is the ability to select ‘Is one of’ and if you have a list of items to filter on in Excel or Word, you can copy the list from Excel or Word and copy it into the ‘Is one of’ field. D365FO will automatically take the list and separate it into a field for each is one of items.
• After
• Before
• Matches

You can also click on the funnel symbol on the left of the grid to open advanced filtering which allows you to filter on multiple fields at once.

When filtering, D365FO also allows for use of expressions such as:

• *
  • Wildcard and can be placed at the beginning, in the middle or at the end. For example, Div* tells D365FO to look for anything that starts with Div or *end* tells D365FO to look for anything that has “end” in it regardless of where.
• !
  • Do not include
• “”
  • Blank

A list of the expressions can be found in this Microsoft Filtering options document.

Filtering can also be done on reports. Before running the report click on Records to Include and then Filter to open the filtering options.

Dropdowns

Watch for dropdown fields to make your life easier. Dropdowns can be found on grids, report parameters, inquiries, and records.

If you have the permission, you can right click on a dropdown arrow and click on View Details to look at the options and details associated with the dropdown options for a specific field.

If you go to anther page through View Details, you can simply use the X in the top right to close the page and automatically return to your original page.

If you have questions about New User Orientation in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, please feel free to reach out to us.