Two VERY under-utilized Dynamics 365 Business Central features: Saved Views and Analysis

I love filters in Dynamics 365 Business Central. I use them all the time. Every time I use a filter, I think to myself “WOW, I keep filtering the same thing every day or every week….”  I know that I can save the filter and create ‘saved views’ but I don’t take the extra minute.  This is why saved views are so underutilized….let’s fix that right now!

If you could count the number of clicks that it takes to do your filtering each and every time you apply the filters and add up that time, you would be surprised at the time wasted. And yet we continue to skip the saving of the view.

And as you will see later in this article, using saved views gives you more ‘screen real estate’ to see more data fields.

Simple to setup, to save, to remove, to start over. So ‘just let’s do it!’

To begin, take any list page (customer, vendor, item, etc.), any ledger entry page (customer ledger, general ledger, etc.), or posted list page (posted sales invoice lines, etc.) and as you use it with filters. Then SAVE THE VIEW!

A Saved View example

In the example below, we are looking at posted sales invoice lines where the type is item and gen. prod posting group is raw material. The resulting page is as follows:

Data is filtered but notice that we cannot see the line amount because the filter pane takes up so much real estate. After I save the view and use it without the filter pane…

There are easily two additional and important fields that I can now see.

Want to take off the filter? It couldn’t be easier….Select ALL. Still the filter pane stays hidden for a better page view.

Analyze Views: A new option

I liked the filtered view so much that I wondered what else that I could do. I thought of Analyze Views, a feature I had not worked with and seemed a bit confusing. This is another underutilized feature because it’s new and we just haven’t spent the time to really understand how to get what we want.