Connecting Excel to Business Central is getting even easier in the 2024 wave 2 release (BC25). The biggest change from my original blog post – no more hardcoding Tenant Ids, and we even have some help with named formulas to make development even faster!
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Excel Reports are extremely useful when you need a detailed dataset. They not only provide a denormalized dataset, but also facilitate the creation of meaningful data connections, pivot charts, visualizations and more. A notable drawback has been the cumbersome process of generating an Excel Report from Business Central. This involves running a report request page, downloading the file, then opening and enabling the workbook before you can access any data. Moreover, once the report is generated, you are left with a static dataset that lacks a refresh option. This means the data remains unchanged from the moment the report was run.
In Business Central 23.3 we were given the ability to create refreshable datasets by calling Business Central APIs from within Excel. Here is a deep dive into how you can create a refreshable Excel Report Layout — all you need is a Business Central API and a Report.
[NOTE]: This blog post was written before the release of BC25 (2024 release wave 2). Extensive improvements have been made to make connecting to APIs through Excel Report Layouts easier. So if you are working with BC25, please check out this blog post
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My most recent project has large footers being added to the bottom of their reports to display Terms and Conditions. This is something fairly common that is requested, and I’ve always shied away from hard-coding anything inside the report layout. If an address changes, then they have to get a developer involved to change the text vs being able to modify it themselves on a setup page. You could use a blob field to store all of the Terms and Conditions, but then you had no way to format a giant block of text, until now. ✨Business Central version 23 now has the power of leveraging the built-in rich text editor, and we can display that formatted text on our reports (with a few gotchas).
I am all for improving efficiency within Business Central, and this new feature in Business Central 2023 release wave 2 (coming in October) is at the top of my list for new features I am excited about!
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BC Development Notebook 