Tag: Business Central

#HumpDayHacks – Search

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

Guess what day it is?! 🐫 Time for some more #HumpDayHacks, brought to you in part by Copilot.

If you are working in Business Central version 24, you may have accidently clicked the Copilot button instead of the Search 🔎 If you are really set on using the Search button, you can use the shortcut ALT + Q (and skip inadvertently opening Copilot). You can actually use the hotkey of ALT throughout Business Central to quickly navigate with your keyboard.

Copilot inside Business Central doesn’t have a hotkey (yet…) but it is available in US BC24 environments with at no additional cost. You can check if it’s enabled in your environment by searching for Copilot & AI capabilities.

#HumpDayHacks – Page Inspection Tool

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVPLeave a comment

I decided it’s time to start sharing some #HumpDayHacks 🐫 to help get you through working with Business Central.

First up, some Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central hacks when working with the Page Inspection tool. You can open it with Ctrl + Alt + F1, or by clicking ❓ Help > Help & Support (at the bottom) >Under Troubleshooting click Inspect Pages and data.

The Page Inspection tool is a cornucopia of information. What objects are you interacting with (be it a page, report, query, XMLPort, etc). You can see the underlying table, and even click “View Table” 🔍 to see the data in the table. More information right at your fingertips are the extensions you are interacting with, the underlying fields and datatypes

Now pay attention: 🤓 If you click on a field, if the field is on the page, it will locate it for you, and take you to it. Much faster than opening VSCode and trying to determine where a field is located on a page.


The comprehensive guide to using Business Central Excel Report Metadata with refreshable APIs

The comprehensive guide to using Business Central Excel Report Metadata with refreshable APIs

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP6 Comments

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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Labels in Business Central Development

Labels in Business Central Development

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP2 Comments

Labels are string constants that can be translated into multiple languages. They can be used for things like captions, descriptions, questions, error messages, or other text constants. Labels have a specific syntax, which includes a text constant, followed by three optional parameters.

ParameterTypeDescription
CommentTextUsed for general comments about the label, specifically giving details about the placeholders in the label.
LockedBooleanWhen Locked is set to true, the label shouldn’t be translated. The default value is false.
MaxLengthIntegerDetermines how much of the label is used. If no maximum length is specified, the string can be any length.
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Working with the Date table in Business Central

Tonya Bricco-Meske, Microsoft MVP1 Comment

If you are working with reports that need to display dates in chronological order, you might be tempted to create a separate table just for that purpose. For example you might want to show the actual and planned production output for each day, week, month, quarter, year, etc. However, creating and maintaining such a table can be tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, there is a better way to handle dates in Business Central.

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