Dynamics 365 Business Central – Tips and Tricks Part 1

Hello and welcome to TMC’s “how-to” demo series for Dynamics 365 Business central, where we explore the features of Business Central for basic tasks within your organization.

If you can’t find a demo you’re looking for let us know in the comments below and we’ll try to make it happen. In this video we’re going to review some of the built-in assists and efficiencies within Dynamics 365 Business Central. Let’s call them tips and tricks. My name is John Hoyt, Solutions Specialist for TMC, let’s get started.

In this video we’re going to cover:

Some basic shortcuts inside Business Central
Some keyboard shortcuts to allow you to work with less reliance on the mouse
We’ll also look at some tips for searching inside Business Central
Filtering inside Business Central when we’re working with lists

Let’s see how this works. So we’ll start on the home page and some real basics. The help key – well the question mark up in the top right corner will get there, but like many products anytime you need help. If you just do control F1 on your keyboard that’ll open the help menu for you. Now we’re context sensitive so it knows what page I’m on. It’ll take me directly into that part of the help menu – really useful control F1 for help. To refresh the page that you’re on you can just click the F5. The function 5 key on your keyboard and that will go refresh everything for you and if you are certain that you have the ability to do a particular task or function or report inside Business Central but you don’t remember exactly where it lives. You can always open your role explorer just by holding down the shift and then the F12 key and this will take you to the view where you can see everything that your security profile would allow you to do and navigate directly to that particular task or activity.

Here from that role explorer view, I’ll navigate back to my home page in some instances maybe I’m working with a list maybe I’m working with my customers for some reason and I need to create a new customer record. Well a new record is just alt and the end key on my keyboard. I’ll create a new business to business customer here. The next available number of course will get a sign for me but I want to put in a note to share some information with my colleagues and I can do that with alt and the letter O and now I can put in my new note, share with everybody, say okay auto save. Of course so I can simply go back to my list of customers, maybe all the way back to my home page move on with my next task maybe that might be working with something like my sales invoices, so I can navigate to the list of sales invoices and for whatever record that I’m focused on. I want access to the fact boxes. Those surrounding pieces of information that relate to that record. Well I can do that simply hitting alt and the f2 key on my keyboard that will open the fact boxes when I’ve learned the information that I need. Alt f2 will again close those it’s just a toggle open or close the fact box is over there on the right. I can also change kind of the focus on the page from the narrow view to the wide view and back to the narrow view that’s going to be done with control F12 narrow view, control F12 again takes me back into the wide view of things.

Now I’m going to return to my home page real quick and we talked about opening the search function earlier that’s with the alt queue. Now within search there’s a couple of specific things that we’ll need to understand the ways I can make search a little bit more efficient. I can of course now just start to put in any word or any phrase or even partial phrases and search will direct me to that appropriate port of the Business Central system. If I want my search to be case insensitive, as it looks through so instead of looking for proper capitalization or all caps or something like I might find at the beginning of a word if i put in a ampersand the ax symbol at the beginning I’m telling the search function I want you to be case insensitive for this particular function. Ignore cases when you do the search for these so that’s the ampersand symbol uh you also have the ability inside the search function to use the question mark we use this essentially as a wild card or a placeholder.

I’m not exactly sure of the spelling of something so I can insert that question mark wherever my doubt might be and then search will take over from there using that as again a wild card. Last I want to pull up something like my chart of accounts and with all of the lists we have of course the ability to have filters and I’ll open that filter panel over here and a couple of things when we’re filtering. I can choose to filter the list by a variety of different things maybe I want to filter by the name field. Let’s say if I just put in a couple of values here or a couple of characters then search will allow me to find that wherever it can. I can include though a set of single

Quotes around those values and that would require an exact character match inside my search. So single quote at the beginning single quote at the end and now when I filter it’s going to find just that specific value. You can use what we call an indefinite unknown character that would be done with using an asterisk within my filter this says find it wherever you find it inside that value and we are going to be case sensitive. As we’re searching and if I’m looking inside something that’s values or numeric something of that type I can say I want you to search for everything except a particular value and I can use that arrow keys to do that not equal to so search within all my balances but I wouldn’t you do that search show me things that are only going to be greater than zero or not equal to zero things of that nature.

So just a couple basic tips on filtering then and then of course once you have those filters created you can save those filters reuse them over and over we start to then refer to them as a view and within those views you’ll always have access to bring them up each time.

So in this video we’ve covered a few basic keyboard shortcuts allowing you to spend less time with the mouse gain those efficiencies that Business Central is so well known for we looked at those shortcuts for some general functions some shortcuts within BC’s lists. We talked about how you can use special characters when you’re searching either in the search menu or within the lists themselves and how you can do some special characters and special functions as you filter inside those lists and then save those filtered views and reuse those over time. That wraps up this video if you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion on what we should cover in the next video please comment down below. I’ll do my best to nswer your comments and if you need any immediate technical support I invite you to visit our website www.abouttmc.com . Also don’t forget to like this video and please subscribe to our channel.