5 Tips To Help You Get The Most From Business Central

Dynamics 365 Business Central comes with a wealth of features and it makes it really simple to utilise them all. With a clean layout and tools which are accessible on every page, here’s our top 5 tips.
 

Business Central Tip 1: Personalisation

As the name suggests, this first tip is all about personalising your account on Business Central. You can personalise the pages on Dynamics 365 Business Central to change what you can see and how they look. With personalisation, you can also add, hide and move fields or freeze panes.

Personalising your homepage (or Role Centre as it’s commonly referred to as):

The following instructions give you guidance for how you can personalise your Business Central homepage, so you only see the data and information which is important and relevant to you.

1. Click the settings icon on the top-right of the page and select personalise.
    

 

2. Begin using the red arrows to move or hide different sets of cues or reports within your homepage.
    

 

3. Click done to complete your new personalised view of your homepage/role centre.

Personalising views of data:

The following instructions set out the steps for personalising your view when it comes to data, such as lists, for example, Customers.

1. Locate the dataset you wish to personalise, in the following example we use Customers.
2. Click the settings icon on the top-right of the page and select personalise.
3. Here we see the ‘+ field’ icon on the left side. This allows us to add additional fields to the page we are on. Users can add, remove, hide or move fields on a page to make it to their own liking.
4. Use the drag and drop interface to select Fields and add them to your dataset
    

 

5. Click done to complete your new personalised view of your homepage/role centre.

Business Central Tip 2: The ‘Bookmark’ Feature

This next Business Central tip is something which is really useful if there’s certain pages on Business Central that you visit frequently and would like quick access to from your role centre.

On any page on Business Central, you’ll see the bookmark option in the top-right of the page. It looks like this:
   
To save a page as a bookmark, simply click the bookmark icon and it will save to your role centre dashboard.

Business Central Tip 3: The ‘Pin’ Feature

Instead of pinning pages to the homepage with bookmarking, you can pin sub-menu’s in a similar way. This is particularly helpful when you need to frequently find certain data; instead of clicking through a typical path to get to a page without searching for it (which we’ll cover below), you can pin sub-menus.

What this does is keep them open, so when you’re on that page again, you won’t need to remember which drop-down button to press in order for all the buttons in the sub-menu to remain visible.
   

As you can see, these sub-menu options will always be there, without you needing to click on the buttons above. Each time you visit this page now, the sub-menu for the default option will be underneath the main set of buttons.

Business Central Tip 4: Search, or The ‘Tell Me’ Function

When you need help with finding something, use the Tell Me (magnifying glass) icon to search for it. You can also use ALT+Q to start using Tell Me.
 

 
When you start typing characters, Business Central immediately displays matches. Results in the list change as you type more characters. If you notice that when you enter the word “product” and the results include Items that’s because Tell Me uses synonyms and alternate search terms to make it easier to find actions, pages, and reports.
 

 
The column to the right indicates the general category of the result. For example, whether it will open a list page or is an administrative task.

At the bottom of the Tell Me page, the action exploring pages and reports opens a feature overview that shows you all available features for your role or for all roles.

Business Central Tip 5: Page Inspection Function

Our final tip is ideal for when you need more information around elements of Business Central, for example why a transaction won’t post, by showing data that isn’t initially shown on the screen.

In the top-right of any screen you’ll see the ‘Help’ (question mark) icon. If you click on it, you can go into the ‘help & support’ and from here ‘inspect pages and data’.

In doing so, you’ll be able to view every field on that particular page. This can be a useful tool as there are often fields that affect data and tasks within Business Central that aren’t displayed.