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| Event Name | Date |
| DynamicsCon Virtual | September 2020 |
Transcript of Content (Disclaimer – Auto Generated):
[Music] i am so excited to be here at the inaugural
0:09 dynamics con all virtual all free event i want to just make sure before i
0:15 take some time to be a little vain and tell a little bit about myself to thank everyone for participating for being
0:22 here today and and for voting i wouldn’t have the chance to be here and share
0:27 some cool things about business central if you didn’t vote for me sit back relax we’re going to talk about
0:32 a few things business central um my name is Shawn Dorward i’m a microsoft mvp
0:38 i’m super excited to be here at dynamics con uh virtual i hate that we’re not
0:44 interacting in real life uh that’s really really important to me but hey we have to do we have to do
0:50 during these times so very very excited i am a practice manager
0:55 at dynamic consulting and i’ve been in this space for about 22 years in the
1:00 in the gp world and a few years ago branched out into the division and business central space
1:05 i write about my life hacks or tips and tricks if you will at lifehacks365.com
1:12 i also am in one of the trio and i podcast mbs podcast.com my friends mark and
1:19 belinda and i talk about all kinds of silly stuff when we have a good time doing it you can follow me on twitter on linkedin all
1:25 that cool stuff um what else anybody anybody okay virtual high five uh let’s get to it we
1:32 have some things to talk about so let’s do it so we don’t i don’t have an agenda slide because
1:38 really who looks at an agenda slide i know they say you should have one but let’s just talk this through so i’m
1:44 going to go through some things that i feel like when i work with customers
1:49 that they these things that they don’t know their goal to them when someone tells
1:54 them and that’s what my mission is here today even if you just pick up one thing or have a good time uh
1:59 throughout i think that is a win for everyone so first thing up is zoom in zoom out
2:05 i have my glasses here my wife said don’t wear them doesn’t look good on camera
2:10 my eyes aren’t as good as they used to and zooming in and zooming out in many applications
2:16 at outlook and teams etc is really really helpful if i just hop over into business central and i do
2:22 two things i can i can use my keyboard the control and the plus sign
2:27 just like any other web browser experience and make that larger for me it’s a little bit of a
2:33 dynamic orientation on there so you can see it resetting itself and trying to put
2:38 things in a good order for us so get it to a good comfortable size for you
2:44 i like it you know a little bit zoomed in you can also use the control and your the
2:50 scrolling wheel on your mouse if your keyboard is set up to typical settings so that’s a really really cool one i’m
2:56 going to just quickly open up i’m in uh where am i in i’m in firefox
3:02 here in my web browser naturally you probably aware that you can use a tablet or your mobile
3:07 device but you may not know about the windows app this is free in the microsoft store
3:14 business central just search for it it’s free you use the same credentials to authenticate
3:19 it is the exact same experience well not quite exact and what i mean by that is
3:24 it doesn’t have the url bar at the top it doesn’t have all of our favorites you know our little side panel twitter
3:30 running our twitter feed and our facebook feed running it’s really just the app focused on there so i’m in
3:36 this is the app and i’m just going to hop over into chartered accounts just by clicking that so i get the same
3:42 experience i’m going to maximize it so you can see the same thing here is true in the app
3:47 control and zoom with my mouse to change the size so i wanted to share that little bonus tip if you will
3:53 because folks do like that a lot from what i see it makes them feel like they’re in the application itself rather
4:00 than out on a web browser and sometimes the web browser takes a little bit too much of the resources from the computer
4:06 you’re on even though the this is sas i still think there’s some benefit maybe
4:11 considering to use this but to that later some other life hacks maybe
4:16 uh you might reconsider and want to use the browser because i’m going to show you some cool tips there so that’s the
4:23 zoom let’s throw that away let’s hop back over to our slides here real quick
4:29 so zoom in zoom out those are actual screenshots you see there so it is really helpful if you have good eyes
4:35 or you want more things on your on your screen you can certainly do so we’ll talk more about how to personalize things as well
4:42 i want to talk about company badges i work with a lot of businesses that have many companies in their business
4:48 central environment and that is awesome but it can be confusing so if you look up in the top
4:55 left we see the company name but it’s black it’s text it sort of blends in
5:02 what environment am i in am i in my sandbox am i uh in production if i’m on a web browser
5:07 i can see some indicators in my url for for which environment i’m in but in
5:13 the app that i just showed you over there uh it’s not as obvious because you don’t
5:19 see the url so we can do something called company badge so i’m just going to go into the company
5:25 card i’m using my search and i’m going to go to company information
5:33 hearing company information let me maximize that joker and i’m going to scroll down i could
5:39 change a lot of stuff in here i’m going to use the power of my hands i’m going to scroll down it was my mouse
5:45 anyway i’m going to scroll down to the bottom company badge right here i’m going to change this to custom i can
5:51 pick a color let’s choose let’s just choose the bright purple and we have four digits here we get to
5:58 identify this company um we’ll just call it um
6:04 i don’t know one two three four will be created so now i have a company badge set
6:09 i’m saved i’m gonna leave the window what’s gonna probably happen is it says hey you made a change to the ui we’re gonna
6:16 want to refresh the screen there we go and we’ll say okay let it refresh only takes a second pretty snappy get
6:24 back into business central and on the top right we see a color-coded indicator for what company we’re in why
6:31 is that important well a couple different reasons one now i’ll see that in the app which is kind of cool because i won’t have the
6:37 url but also if you look at this window right here that i’m on i don’t see that text version that is
6:43 out on my role center or my home page so i don’t know without looking in my url
6:49 and seeing what company i’m in now i can see that but what else is really cool about this
6:54 is i can click on it and it tells me the company name and which environment i’m in so if you’ve got a sandbox
7:02 environment and a production environment oh a sneak peek on some fall releases i heard or i
7:10 read on the website that microsoft is going to create some sort or remove the restriction on the counts
7:16 so you can have multiple sandbox environments in multiple production environments which is pretty cool but anyway i digress let me focus uh
7:23 what was i saying okay now i know what environment i’m in and that’s really cool especially in
7:30 diverse organizations where we have a perhaps a sandbox for development purposes
7:35 and production i have done this myself if you have done it you know the pain um
7:42 but the last thing you want to do is reconcile a bank account or a gl account and chase
7:48 your tail all to find out you’re in the wrong environment it’s happened to me hopefully it hasn’t happened to you
7:53 that’s the company batch pretty cool all right so let’s take a look at what’s next company badge
8:01 that’s a win pop out pages hey you don’t want to put too many o’s in the word pop i’m just saying
8:07 pop out pages what is great about this speaking of bank reconciliation i hear
8:12 you laughing speaking of bank reconciliation if you’ve ever done a bank reconciliation before you’re going to
8:19 totally appreciate this one screen is absolutely never enough in fact it’s never enough for anything we
8:24 do anymore but doing a bankrec we have our work on one side of the screen or one monitor
8:29 and the details of that work somewhere else and so if we come into let’s just look at
8:37 we’ll take a shortcut through the chart of accounts to take a look at our checking account
8:44 general ledger entries here so let me get rid of the fact boxes
8:50 uh or is it reverse on video i don’t know i’ll get rid of the fact box and what was i saying i got a little
8:56 lost in my silly humor oh yeah the popping out of the window so now if i want to
9:01 work on my bank rack or any kind of reconciliation this is just an example
9:07 we can come up here to the top right and choose pop out and this takes that window and puts
9:14 it in its own free floating window where we can change the size maybe we want to come up and put that
9:21 somewhere while we’re looking at other things or maybe just on another monitor that’s popping out the window simple uh
9:29 but beautiful i love it uh certainly we can use multiple tabs all right so if we come up actually i
9:36 don’t think that one will dock but we can open up business central in another tab as well but it’s nice to
9:41 kind of see them floating at the same time so we can check what we need to check in our reconciliation
9:47 uh with that information open all right so let’s go back and see what’s next notification
9:54 settings this one uh so we get notified for all kinds of things here i have some smart currency updates
10:01 we’re gonna try all this we uh we didn’t run the forecaster we have low inventory we
10:08 whatever it is we get these notifications sometimes they’re really helpful sometimes they’re really annoying
10:13 i know it you know it don’t tell microsoft but let’s go into my notifications
10:22 now in my notifications this is a list of all the notifications that are set up and we can just simply come in and
10:29 remove the check box on enable and then we’ll no longer get that notification on the other side of that if you
10:37 inadvertently removed one and you find value in that you come back in and check the box and you’re good to
10:43 go that’s pretty cool a nice little gem speaking of let me go ahead and put that back and
10:50 we’ll see what’s next on our list
10:56 notification settings outlook to the rescue here’s another one this is one that i love
11:02 showing folks because in talking this through because uh often we’re talking about it as a
11:08 microsoft gold partner uh often we’re talking about it uh on the entry
11:13 uh of an engagement but then we really don’t bring it into the business process after implementation
11:19 so here’s a chance to take something big home with you or you’re probably at home already but to the office
11:25 or through teams with you that i think will really help and this is the outlook add-ins so you can
11:32 install the outlook add-in for business central it gets stocked up in your ribbon as
11:39 contact insights and new now if you don’t know how to take care of installing the add-in i put a
11:44 link here which i believe maybe you get that link um but if you don’t know
11:53 how to do it you could simply go to the docs website to find out how to get it it’s free
11:59 you should be able to do without your it folks but i’m going to show you just some of what can happen in outlook with the add-in for business
12:06 central now i have a little bit of adhd in me and i get distracted kind of easily
12:13 don’t tell anyone um so i like to minimize those distractions and i think this is one of those great ways
12:19 that would be really helpful for me and that’s another reason why i like showing it so i got an email from a customer or a vendor and i can
12:27 come up to contact insights and open up the business central add-in right within outlook so this is the same
12:34 data there’s no delay none of that stuff i can even just say hey they want to buy a generator i can
12:40 create a sales order right from here if this email address had matched my
12:45 contact uh it would have or didn’t have duplicates it would have auto associated it with with a particular
12:52 contact so i’m just going to pick one so i’m going to say hey we’re going to work with this contact now look at that
12:58 uh you know that’s pretty fantastic we see all of our tiles all of our metrics
13:04 even the color cues and indicators and they’re not just there for us to see
13:10 the numbers we can click and drill through that data to see the actual
13:15 uh data that supports those numbers so we can make decisions right from within outlook about the
13:21 activity coming through our email also we can go and just do like i said a sales order
13:27 so here i’m going to say sales order
13:33 also what we can do is just come up here to new and go to sales order we can do this for a vendor to create an
13:38 invoice we could communicate we could create the sales order and send them off an email right from
13:43 with that in outlook and even post the transactions from here we don’t even have to go
13:48 out into the web browser or into the app to uh to initiate those transactions and post
13:55 them it’s happening in real time and against the same database pretty cool we don’t have to wait for a
14:00 nightly sink or anything like that and i can get all that work done right from when within outlook and i think that’s a big
14:06 win i hope you like that there’s a whole lot more to this if i wanted to see any of the information i
14:11 could quickly click i could even pop this out so this there’s an example of
14:16 a a document from business central and it’s literally showing me the same
14:22 information organized and oriented in the same way as i would see out on the browser pretty pretty cool
14:30 not only that but as i said sending emails uh including pdfs of the sales order for
14:37 example directly to uh to your customer pretty pretty cool a big win
14:44 outlook uh very very underutilized in my opinion huge time saver check it out
14:51 if you need help you can you’ll get my email after this i’d love to help you because this is a big one let’s put it to work all right
15:00 next up saving filter views so everything in business central a list
15:07 a document a master record they’re all great but lists we love
15:13 especially those of us in finance so let’s just hop back into uh the
15:18 cash account we were looking at earlier and we can we can take this and we can filter this
15:24 so i’m going to filter it and i can say uh let me just filter to this date or to this value that i have
15:31 highlighted which is 331. it’s going to drop in those automatically for me
15:36 now let’s just say that i want to do we’ll get rid of the gl account
15:44 and we’ll do everything from january 1st 2019 why not 2020 because
15:51 nobody wants to remember 2020. let’s be honest let’s just 2019 2021 let’s just do it
15:58 uh we’re going to do 2019 uh we’ll just do the month of january hit
16:04 tab boom my list is filtered now i want to save this
16:10 because i don’t have to keep doing those even though there was a small step i don’t have to keep doing that each time all i have to do is come up
16:16 here go to save and i’m going to i’ll just use my initials nope let’s do something better
16:22 sean rocks sean rocks now that’s my list right there it is
16:29 give myself a little atta boy and now i have this list real easy no problems by the way if you
16:37 didn’t know the filter is not just one field um i’ve seen folks struggle with that so
16:42 you can use uh let’s just grab another one so we’ll just grab and we’ll pick from another they’ll
16:49 probably give us up but you get the idea more than one field is available we’ll just undo that
16:55 and that’s a little bit about saving filter views list views call what you want i like to call them
17:01 smart lists but hey that’s just me being the old gp guy i guess uh anyway
17:07 let’s see what’s next personalizing your screen wow uh this is too cool um
17:14 and and i really mean that it still blows my mind that what we’re going to go through and
17:19 i’m going to show you is in a web browser and so what i want to talk about here
17:25 a couple things personalization personalization so making the user
17:32 interface your own what is good for you and when you make these changes it’s
17:37 only for you which is awesome the only thing i want to throw in there before i show you this is is a little
17:44 bit of a warning that if you’re going to take screenshots for procedure manuals now let’s be
17:51 honest not very many people do procedure manuals anymore but those of you that do if you’re going to
17:57 do this be a little cautious because your screen that you’re taking screenshots with or from may not be the same as
18:04 everyone else’s okay so let’s see what this does we’re going to go over into sales orders and in sales
18:13 orders this beautiful list look at my beautiful list isn’t it such a beautiful list here’s my sales order sales orders uh so
18:21 i’ve got my sales order number on the left hand side and i’ve got some information that uh is over here to the right
18:27 i see that and maybe i’ve got some fields here that i just don’t use and if i take just a few minutes of time
18:34 on each of these windows business central remembers all of my preferences from the last time i was in
18:40 here and which i think is pretty awesome so what i want to do is clean this up and personalize it so i’m going to come
18:46 up to the gear okay so what i’m going to do is i’m going to come up to the gear and i’m
18:51 going to go to personalize this opens up in the browser a personalization
18:57 little ribbon there and here we can we get some red bars and some some indicators here
19:03 so here’s where we can click on this field if we don’t want this field we can say hide
19:10 bye-bye uh location code i don’t use it on this list let’s get rid of it
19:15 um but now i’m gonna look at this other field so i’m making it my own a little bit more right i’m gonna get rid of that one as well
19:22 pretty cool a little easier you know looks just a whole lot better already but what else i want to do is i want to
19:29 take this i’m going to look at the available fields i would like to see posting date in here
19:35 now i’m in the non-posted sales order so that i would also like to see
19:43 let’s see look let’s just grab this one
19:48 what else build two let’s drop that one on there okay so now here’s my list this
19:54 is my perfect list i’m gonna hit done it gets rid of my personalization ribbon
20:01 gets rid of my field list and here is my list of sales orders now when i come
20:06 back in here in the sales orders every time i come in here for me when
20:14 i’m logged in as me it’s going to remember exactly what i just did now let me show you something else if i slide
20:20 to the right crisscross i didn’t when i slid over there uh i
20:27 i lost my customer name you see slide to the right lost my customer name
20:33 so i’m going to go back into personalized mode and i’m going to change my freeze pane
20:40 sorry freeze pane i’m going to change my freeze pane and i’m going to say set this freeze
20:46 pane so now it moves that just like in excel so now when i slide to the right it’s
20:51 going to keep that there for me pretty pretty cool just another nice little thing about
20:56 about personalizations so many more things i’m going to show you one or two more things real quick so
21:03 let’s go into one of these sales orders and let’s take a look at what’s going on
21:09 in here so we have our fact boxes which are right now tucked away
21:14 i’m going to open that up so if i if i want that open all the time i’ll
21:20 just open it up i could do that that’s not part of personalization mode but still it remembers it every time
21:26 but let’s click on show more here in our header in our general section look at all of our fields
21:31 in this fast tab that’s what this area is called here we could collapse that and see what’s risen to the top here
21:39 these are the fields that are set to show in our in our fast tab when we collapse it so
21:45 we have three different things we’ve got show everything show less which is sort of the default
21:50 and then if we collapse it it’s pushing those values up there so i get a lot more room on my screen
21:56 which is really cool um so if i do that now you know like i said it’s just going to
22:02 remember that each time now what else i can do is if this is just too much maybe i want
22:09 to see this but i don’t need to see the order date and the external document number so i
22:15 can go ahead and do that come into personalize
22:20 hide the document number and hide the order date they’re still there everything you hide
22:26 is still there it’s just not taking up the space for you what else i could do if i just look
22:31 at this i’m not going to show right now but that show under show more means hey it’s not the default you have to click
22:37 show more and show when collapsed that’s what puts it up in the fast tab for us pretty cool awesome
22:46 we already talked about that let’s talk about this cool one another small little gem
22:53 in the personalization that i love showing folks as well and this is called quick entry so let’s
22:59 go into purchase orders and we’re just going to take a quick look at purchase order
23:05 by the way if you make all these personalizations to any screen and you just don’t like it maybe you
23:12 feel like you over did it somehow uh you could say this clear personalization
23:18 that’ll remove and put everything right back to the way it was out of the box
23:23 so that you don’t have personalization on this page so now i’m going to go into purchase order and let’s take a look at
23:31 quick entry pretty great stuff here so let’s if i need to add an inventory item i’m
23:37 just going to come down here and choose item and i’ll put television and i’ll pick
23:43 that [Music] and we’ll do quantity one and as i move
23:48 through here in order for me to get to the nether the next row i kind of
23:54 have to hit down somewhere but then i have to get all the way back to beginning where i need to pick up my mouse
24:00 not very efficient and that’s the purpose of quick entry so let’s talk about that for
24:06 a second and let’s go into personalize and when
24:12 we’re in personalize here we can look at each one of these fields
24:18 let me slide back over and we’re going to look at each one of these fields and we’re going to say
24:24 exclude from quick entry okay so the point of quick entry is that when
24:30 you hit enter it’s the enter key not the tab key that you move only to the fields that you want to move
24:37 to so if we exclude that we’ll exclude that we’ll make sure description is included so that’s set we’ll exclude
24:45 that will well we need quantity right
24:52 we’ll leave that direct unit cost and then we’ll just kind of exclude everything else
25:00 [Music] so i’m gonna just exclude each one of
25:05 these well there’s a lot but that’s okay all you have to do is just take the
25:12 minute get rid of them and then it’s gonna be so much better
25:19 forever i didn’t realize there was this many
25:24 holy moly that’s okay we already did that one
25:31 i lost track okay i’m hurrying i’m hurrying i promise don’t rush me wow
25:39 so almost there but you know i tongue-in-cheek making a joke about it it takes just a minute
25:45 to get it set so now it’s set i can say done now when i come in here i can say on
25:52 this line i’ll do item oops
25:59 i’ll pick item and i’m gonna hit enter i hit enter it
26:06 moved me over to description if i knew how to type i’m going to hit
26:12 enter it’s going to take me to quantity hit enter pieces is right
26:17 my unit cost is right look what it did instead of going all the way through all those fields it
26:23 brought me right back down here and i could even exclude that one if i want it will be like that every single time
26:28 now i put a little bit of work in there um to exclude the ones i didn’t want now
26:33 i can still use the mouse and drive over there and make changes to it that’s fine it’s just for data entry remember
26:40 that is the enter key not the tab some folks give it a shot and then they use the tab and then they
26:48 feel like they didn’t do a good job but it is the enter key so let’s see
26:53 what’s next modify posted descriptions oh boy so this one’s fun so
27:00 yeah adhd but also maybe a little ocd uh if something is spelled wrong and i’m
27:06 a terrible speller which is probably why i like this one myself because then i don’t feel as embarrassed or if it’s
27:11 just inappropriately or inadequately named when something hits the general ledger it’s there and it’s on your reports and
27:18 it’s in all your lists and if you need to make a change to it you can do that um so maybe you didn’t know that was the
27:25 case but you can do that and this is under let’s go into general ledger entries
27:31 so i’m going to come into business central go to the search search for general ledger entries there
27:38 we go and in general ledger entries here is
27:43 where i have the ability to change the posted description
27:49 now you may be thinking this already but just to kind of get ahead of that this does keep an audit log
27:56 there is values do get added to the change log in the background that you can report on if you ever needed to
28:02 which is kind of cool um so we can come in here if i come in here you this is why you may not know it’s an option
28:09 but coming here it doesn’t seem like i can do anything but if i hit edit list
28:14 now it opens up and it lets me change the description note
28:19 just the description i knew you were gonna ask i knew i knew you were gonna i knew it i
28:25 knew it anyway uh just the description so we could change the description to something awesome
28:33 and now it’s saving saved and now that’s the description for that transaction
28:39 really really helpful maybe you won’t need it all that often but it is an option and it does create
28:45 a log entry so if you’re not familiar with that that’s under the change
28:50 log so here’s the change log entry list and there’s a lot of stuff in here just
28:56 for me using this environment but that is where you would find and drill into that information
29:01 pretty cool all right let’s go what’s next skipping zero balance lines i love this
29:09 we have old accounts in our system maybe they were used up until 2017 and we’re
29:14 running a p l for 2018 or something of that nature this is kind of hidden a little bit in
29:20 my opinion so i wanted to just show that okay so this is kind of hidden in my opinion so
29:27 let me show you i’m gonna hop over into business central and i’m gonna open up account schedules
29:36 and here we go so when i come into account schedules take a look here this is normally what
29:42 folks see i’m going to pick my accounts account schedule layout my column layout given my date parameters but if i click
29:49 show more and i go all the way to the bottom that’s where the option is for skipping
29:56 zero balance lines you’re welcome okay so let’s see what’s next posting in bulk
30:03 oh this is awesome um and i literally just showed someone this about a week in africa which is why
30:08 it’s in here because i’m gonna show you how to post in bulk there’s a couple different things to
30:15 this that you need to know about but i thought it’d be good to just get started here so if i use the vertical
30:21 three dots here i can look and see select more so i’m going to select this one now this is a
30:26 purchase order and if you go in to open the purchase sort and you go to post you have to select all these options you
30:32 have to wait for it to churn and then it creates a file and then you go to the next one and you have to do
30:38 the same thing and that’s what this this individual was doing and they were showing me that some
30:45 postings were taking a little longer than other postings it was actually it was noticeable but it was more uh
30:52 because of the amount of lines that were in the in the document itself uh but coming
30:57 back to the point here was i i asked why they didn’t use posting in bulk and they weren’t aware of it so
31:02 here we are so i picked my first one i’m gonna pick additional ones
31:08 i could pick them all this is true in other areas as well and i’m just gonna come up to posting
31:14 and i’m gonna i could choose post post and print i’m gonna choose post bash because what’s cool about this is you
31:19 can also set this so that it it processes in the background so it doesn’t interfere with the
31:25 the end users experience and you don’t have to wait for it and if there’s errors it puts it in an
31:30 error log and you can even have the the pdf uh generates your report inbox which is
31:35 pretty cool uh but we’re going to just do it like this so i’ve got five selected and i i’m going to say they’re going to
31:40 rece we’re going to receive and invoice them and that’s it that’s all i’m going to say here for now and we’ll just hit post
31:49 and now i can wait it out doesn’t take too long that’s five but
31:57 not so bad i got an error i can go fix my errors but remember you could do this on a in a schedule
32:04 which is really really cool so be sure to take advantage of that that’s journal entries sales orders
32:09 you name it um posting in bulk very very cool let’s see what’s next importing
32:16 inventory images this is really cool i know
32:21 you’re going to love it too let’s go into items
32:27 and take a look at an inventory item i’m just going to open up the first one android device one very creative
32:35 no picture associated with this item i can choose picture and i can take a
32:42 photo maybe you know you want to assign a picture of me to this inventory item
32:48 that’s fine i can import it just by clicking import and go finding the file
32:54 out on my computer or sharepoint or wherever that is now what i also can do
33:01 is if i have a large set of inventory and i’m adding it to the
33:07 system or want to put refreshed or newer crisper pictures all i have to do is have
33:13 my inventory image saved as my inventory item number and then import them
33:19 in the system so i’m going to show you that let’s take a look i’m going to come out of the inventory card
33:25 and i’m going to search for imports i don’t remember exactly what it’s
33:30 called import item pictures so here what the deal is though is that
33:36 those the image itself has to be named the item number uh and then you zip them up into
33:44 a zip file so that’s basically what i’m gonna do now i have that i have two items out
33:49 there i’m gonna go and i’m gonna pick my zip file
33:56 and there it is so i have two images in there one is named zero zero one and zero zero two zero two
34:02 a and it found those matches really cool because of the naming convention
34:08 zip file business central does all the work and all i have to do is import the pictures and boom two pictures have been added
34:16 and if i go over to my items
34:21 and i’ll look at those items those two items those pictures will be assigned to those inventory items that’s
34:28 fantastic i’ve done this with about 600 images
34:33 excellent as well i don’t know what what you know how it would work with a thousand or ten thousand um but doing
34:40 batches if it gives you trouble but you saw how fast it was for just two pretty pretty cool i love it i love it i
34:47 love it what’s next merging vendors or customers so uh this is this is
34:54 super powerful i just can’t get over how clean this is and how helpful this
35:01 is for folks maybe who don’t even realize it’s there it’s going to change a lot and clean up their customer list so
35:07 if you have customers i hope you have customers if you have customers in your system
35:14 this is true for vendors as well okay so if you have customers in your system and
35:19 uh here i’ve got sean’s cool company too small for you you say i’m gonna zoom in um sean’s cool company
35:26 and sean’s cool company spelled the other way i won’t say the wrong way but the other way
35:32 and i need to combine them they both have transactions so i’m going to just go into one [Music]
35:39 i’ll pick one i’m going to come into one and then i’m going to go
35:44 to actions functions merge with
35:52 actions functions merge with actions anyway um merge with so
36:00 the one i’m originating this on is where is gonna be the one that wins uh that stays so i’m gonna merge
36:06 this with the other one so that was 20 and i’m going to say merge it with 10
36:16 let it do all the matching and then i can simply choose merge do i want to merge these two records
36:22 this step cannot be undone you’ve been warned yes i want to merge them
36:28 and now all of the transactions for both of those customers are going to live and reside
36:34 under one so there we are 20 was the winner and that’s where all
36:42 the transactions are pretty cool that also works for vendors as well so be sure to check that out
36:48 excellent excellent stuff let’s talk about the payment predictor payment predictor
36:55 uh pretty cool this is something that you can you can step your game up a little bit and and
37:02 use azure if you’d like like to have this process run for larger rules and things like that
37:11 but out of the box we can enable this and and have it look at our payment terms for the customer and their history
37:18 and measure whether or not the system thinks they’ll be a low medium or high risk
37:24 for them paying this is under actions and predict payment uh so check that out if you’re putting
37:29 an order in you want to see what the likelihood is and this also is a field that can show on your list
37:35 for payment prediction uh right there in my customer ledger entries
37:40 i can see i’ve got the payment prediction for these were set as on time but one was a
37:46 little set low i’m not sure why i didn’t dig into it um but that’s how that works it’s pretty
37:53 cool check it out i want to tell you about assisted setup and manual setup
38:01 assisted setup when i talked about that outlook add-in earlier it’s real easy
38:08 i’m going to come into the gear and go to assisted setup assisted setup gives me a nice list of things that are
38:14 available that are wizard based so i’m going to come down here to set up your business inbox and
38:19 outlook this should be this easy for you as well i’ve already done it do i want to run it again i could just hit run again
38:26 fingers crossed that doesn’t have any issues i’m going to run it run it from my mailbox hit next send a sample message hit next
38:34 and finish now why was that so easy because i’m using an account that has uh been authenticated in business
38:41 central through office 365. so if i jump over into
38:47 business center or to outlook been a long day uh jump over to outlook i should see an
38:52 email come through there from the assisted setup engine
38:58 configuring my system to outlook mine was already done that’s how we’re able to do this cool stuff but what if you need to
39:04 change some of this what if you need to change some of this it’s really not a very explanatory way
39:10 in here and that’s where it comes manual setup so if i search for manual setup
39:18 in business central i can go to the manual setup window list
39:25 page and here’s a list of all of the setup activities
39:31 objects in the system so i’m just going to search here i’m just going to search for email and there’s my email so in the wizard in
39:38 the assisted setup it didn’t really give me a chance to remove it not that i would necessarily remove this
39:45 but now i can because i’m in the actual configuration window which is pretty cool uh so that’s a nice
39:51 little tip i think some folks may find that helpful i hope you do so we’re going to talk page inspection
39:57 real quick uh any page you’re on if you want to know the table or any
40:03 information about the fields let’s take a look at that i have the shortcut in here because i can never
40:09 remember control alt f1 so control alt f1 will pop open the page inspector it’s
40:16 going to tell me the page and the table and a list of the fields
40:22 involved in this window that could be pretty helpful especially when if you’re doing light
40:27 development work or you just want to start to figure out a little bit more about the infrastructure of the system and we’ll
40:33 talk just briefly about that as we go into our next section so one of the point page inspector out and let’s go to the
40:40 next one so there’s a net i get asked this all the time how do i get a list of the tables well it’s easy uh
40:46 if you go into your system and you choose table information and in table information
40:54 so easy here’s a list of my tables in my system and i can go to page and open this in excel
41:00 and see all of my tables uh and including their number of records in the record size so
41:06 i get asked that a lot wanted to point that out what’s next web services so let’s talk about web
41:12 services and don’t let me lose you on this because it’s really cool especially for anyone that wants to get data out of
41:18 their system i might have your attention now let’s go into web services
41:23 web services there’s a whole lot to talk about here but i’m just going to focus on something very simple
41:29 this is where you can get an o data link and you can use these odata urls
41:36 in excel or power bi to access the data from within your system so let’s get a
41:42 quick one here we’ll do go to the top
41:48 and we’ll do customer card so i’m just going to copy this
41:55 that’s the url and i’m going to go into excel i’m not going to draw not yet i’m going
42:01 to go to get data and i’m going to go to other and then oh data and i’m going to
42:09 paste that url in here and what this is going to do it’s going to authenticate the same credentials
42:14 that i use for business central doesn’t look like i copied it properly so let me try it
42:20 by clicking it this little cheat i do i click it and then i copy it from the browser if
42:26 it doesn’t want to capture it right so we’ll definitely that’s a great little workaround tip there
42:32 paste that in the odata it’s gonna authenticate my user make sure i’m a valid and authorized person to access this
42:39 data and if not it’ll ask you to sign in and then it’s going to load it into
42:45 excel i can save this excel file i can pivot you know if it was transaction data i could pivot it
42:52 whatever but let’s go into business central and i’ll show you what i mean
42:57 now this is just a simple customer list but imagine your general
43:02 ledger accounts or posted transactions all those kind of things that you like to pivot
43:08 and flex and analyze i’m just going to create a quick new customer
43:13 and i’m going to call it even newer customer and saved come over into excel
43:21 refresh my data and this is a live lookup boom so there’s my even newer customer and
43:28 think about this in terms of gl transactions like i said posted documents this is just the customers not such a bad example
43:35 but the power of pivoting and those kind of things and the same kind of approach for power
43:40 bi so i want you to be sure to check out web services there are a few that are in there out of
43:47 the box however you can also add your own and that’s what i want to show here
43:55 real easy you just come into web services and go to new and find your objects pretty pretty
44:03 simple but powerful i love this because i get quick
44:09 easy access to those pages that i use the most like the navigation page uh how about
44:15 just adding a shortcut to that window instead of having to go find it every time check it out real easy to do just a
44:21 little tip i think i have one more thing i have enough time for one more right we’re good in the back i have time for one more and this is just a little
44:27 bit of a walk and talk and if you know business central and how its infrastructure is built
44:34 it is in the cloud it is a sas product and we do not have access direct to the
44:39 database which makes it challenging this is something coming out in the fall
44:44 we don’t have it yet unless it’s already the fall when you’re watching this but we don’t have it just yet as of today
44:49 but i know um for sure that this is going to change your world if you want to build your own query
44:57 that feature is coming this fall set to release in business central uh for in october it is a power app that
45:04 lives within business central that you call upon and you pick tables and you can build relationships
45:11 right within business central give it your own name it’s called smart list designer um
45:16 so it will create those custom views for you they even have their own specific number
45:21 range for those who are familiar with the objects uh so so incredible
45:27 probably one of the most impressive advances uh features that i’ve seen i’m just
45:33 really excited to tell the entire world about it and that is coming this fall check it out
45:38 there’s an example of one that i actually built and and that’s i combined those tables those
45:45 four different tables to get sort of my own cost of goods sold list i absolutely love it be on the lookout
45:52 for that to be released this fall learn lots of cool new things from business central every single day
45:58 so be sure to check that out in the fall you’re going to love it i absolutely know it that is our last and final life hacks
46:03 for today i want to thank you all for participating and joining in on my session here at dynamics con 2020
46:10 the very first one the inaugural one i’m so privileged to be a part of it thank you for everyone who voted for me i hope you learned something
46:16 feel free to visit me at lifehacks365.com and send me a message if i can help you
46:21 at all
Thanks for reading!
Shawn Dorward
Microsoft MVP, Business Applications
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