Lookup window tips

Today’s #TipTuesday contains some Lookup window tips. After last week’s tip on finding a shortcut to the Available to Promise window, I realized there are some hidden gems on Dynamics GP Lookup windows that are often overlooked.

What’s a “Lookup” window?

Simply stated, these are the windows behind any magnifying glass icon in Dynamics GP. The primary purpose of these are to find or “lookup” a record and use it or view it in another window.

The basics of a Lookup window

Most Lookup windows have a similar look and feel, at least within the Dynamics GP core product modules. Once you get into “formerly a third party product” modules (Fixed Assets for example) or actual ISV or third party products, many of these things may not apply.

For this general feature overview, I’ll use the Accounts lookup as my example. Below that is the Item lookup and other than actual content, you can see the windows are virtually identical.

• Find By: at the top of the window, the words Find By _______ will be the field being sorted in the Lookup window. In both of my examples above, the ID is the field that is the default sort in the window so that is the default Find By.
  • To change this: click on any column heading to both re-sort the window by that column, and to search in the Find By text box. You’ll notice the words change as you select a different column (Find By Account Number becomes Find By Account Description, for instance).
  • Pro tip: if you are using the Find By text box, to “start” the search you merely have to exit the field (i.e. press the Tab key on your keyboard). I repeatedly see users clicking on the binoculars icon, which actually opens up an advanced search. Many users feel they need to click on something to “find by” what they type in the text box, because many other windows in Dynamics GP have a “Redisplay” button!
• Binoculars icon: clicking on this button opens up an Advanced Search window which is the same search window as you would use in Smartlist. Up to 4 fields can be searched on at a time, match 1 or match all options, etc. just like Smartlist search.
• New and Open buttons: The New button opens the “Maintenance” or “Setup” window for the type of lookup you are in, to create a new record of that type (GL account, Inventory item, etc.). This does require that you have security to that window of course, as the button is always enabled (I believe) regardless if you have access or not. The Open button opens the selected record in the Maintenance or Setup window, for editing or whatever purpose.

• Show/Hide button: AKA the “mini-blinds” as I like to call them, the button on the right hand side of the blue bar expands the lookup window to show multiple lines of data. Depending on which Lookup window you have, this may be useful.
  • Example: above is the expanded Vendor Lookup window. If you have multiple Vendor IDs for similar vendors, or the same vendor with multiple addresses, this can be a super easy way to differentiate without selecting one by accident and picking the wrong one.

• Additional Sorts: The “3rd” column on most Lookup windows is the Additional Sorts column. The Lookup windows have some pre-defined relatively-common fields that you can choose from.
  • Example: on the Customer Lookup, Customer Class, Salesperson, Territory etc. are some of the fields you could choose from.
  • If none of those are relevant to you, choose Custom Sort and this is what you will see:

• In this Custom Sort window, you can select nearly any field related to the set of records you are looking up and insert multiple fields to sort on.

• Clicking on the blue bar above the fields and column headers, will show the different options for View By.
  • Each type of Lookup may have different options here. On some Lookups, you can “Set as Default View” for your lookup from this menu (Customer, Vendor, Item etc.). That means setting criteria for your Lookup and that “sticks” next time you use the lookup.
  • In subledgers, often there are options for hiding inactive records in this menu
  • The “Favorites” option shows you Smartlist favorites for that particular related Smartlist that you can restrict your lookup by.
  • In transaction lookups for modules like Sales Order Processing, there are options to view records only in the selected batch or all batches and view all SOP Types or just one.

Those are the highlights of the Lookup windows, and that’s all for now!