BC 2023 Wave 1 Preview: Analysis Views
Updated: Mar 4, 2023
What are analysis views? If you're coming from Dynamics GP, they have a product called SmartList, think of views as Smartlist where you can do filtering of your data. You can sort your data, you can do multi-filter, much better than the Dynamics GP interfaces. Now Microsoft has built a very similar product to SmartList Builder, called Analysis Views. All from inside Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) with no additional charge. The analysis view allows users to add totals, group, and pivot to your data.
But because we're in a new sandbox version, what I want to do is search for feature management. Feature management, just so you know, it is a thing that's inside of BC that allows administrators to enable and disable new features. If there's something your team just wants to test and you want to disable it for a little while users test it, you can do that. If you're scared of what a new feature is going to do, you can control it with Feature Management. If you expand the feature description column out a little bit you will be able to see all the new features that are coming. And then up here, we can see, here's this analysis mode, quickly analyze data inside BC. I will enable that view to test it out in the preview version.
Once we have that turned on, navigate to a list, in my case, I used Sales Orders. We will notice a new analyze button next to the search bar that wasn't there before. It just automatically showed analysis on what was in the actual window view from sales orders. From the drop-down menu, I can rename the analysis, I can also duplicate it to add additional features, or I can create a new one. The analysis view automatically added and totaled any currency-based values for me automatically.
Very cool, I love this. And of course, just like any other window in BC, you can always personalize it and add or remove additional columns, before you perform the analysis. I know there's been talk of users requesting graphs within the analysis views as well. If we do get that added in a future release, users will be filtering the data and sending it directly to power BI inside BC. Microsoft, if you're listening, that would be a nice and super cool feature.
Well wow, well done. Microsoft. Very excited to see what else is in this preview. I'm going to be looking at it over the next few weeks and hopefully sharing some new features with the community. If you are reading this and you want to try this but don't have BC yet, contact us and we will provide you with a free 30-day trial. If you are a current BC user needing assistance, contact us if you need help. You can visit us at abccgroup.com or email us: smullins@abccgroup.com.
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