Microsoft Dynamics 365 Advanced Finds 101: How to Change Your Status and Add Filter Criteria

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Advanced Finds 101: How to Change Your Status and Add Filter Criteria

So, you’ve spent time learning Microsoft Dynamics 365 and entering data into the system.

But, how can you retrieve that data to create Views and Reports for yourself and other users?

In this blog post series, you will learn how to use Advanced Finds, a powerful query tool that allows you to filter the list of records you want to see in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and create Views to easily find these lists in the future.

You can also use Advanced Finds to prepare data for export to Office Excel where you can analyze, summarize, or aggregate data from different perspectives.

For this first post in the series, we will cover how to get started with Advanced Finds…

To create Advanced Finds, hop into your Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment.

Start with a list of active accounts (or any entity you are interested in viewing). To access the Advanced Find functionality, click on the filter icon in the top right corner in the ribbon in Microsoft Dynamics 365.

When you click on the Advanced Find icon, a window will open. You’ll see that the “Look for” is set to “Accounts.”

In the “Look for,” we’ve started with the list of “Accounts.” If you started within a list of records, as we did, the “Look for” will auto-populate with the entity you’re on.

This is always going to be the entity that you’re searching for, and we’re going to start from the “Use Saved View” of “Active Accounts.”

This gives us a filter “Status Equals: Active,” which saves us a few additional clicks.

We recommend starting from within a View so that you have fewer filters to add; as you can see here there are already filters added so you don’t have to take the time to filter out the inactive records by adding a status filter.

We already have “Status Equals: Active,” which saves us a few additional clicks.

In order to add additional filters, click on “Details” in the top menu bar of your pop-up window if it is not already highlighted.

This will give you the option to remove your current filter, if you needed to, or add a new filter.

For this example, we will add a new filter. Currently, if we were to “View Results,” we would see all of the Active Accounts in Microsoft Dynamics 365.

However, we want to narrow down that list for the purpose of this example.

Let’s say that we wanted to narrow this list to include accounts that are only in a specific city.

So, if you “View Results,” you will see that you start with 107 accounts (for this example).

For this post, let’s imagine that we only need to view accounts in the Seattle, Washington area.

To filter by city, click back over into the Advanced Find tab, and click “Select” to define your search criteria further. If Select is not available to add a new filter, click Details at the top towards the middle of the Advanced Find window.

When you click “Select,” you will see a list of fields that are found on the entity selected in the Look For dropdown. In this case, we will click on the “Address 1: City” field.

Leave your operator at “Equals.” This is the part of the expression that defines how a specific attribute should be compared with a value. Should it equal the value? Should it just contain the value? Should it be blank entirely?

For example, if we choose “Does Not Contain Data,” it would show us accounts that are active where there is no city specified.

There are many different options to choose from, depending on your specific needs.

For this example, we are going with “Address 1: City” “Equals” “Seattle.”

This will narrow your list down from 107 accounts to a smaller list that just contains accounts where the status is set to “Active” and the “Address 1: City” is set to “Seattle.”

Next week, we will cover how to Edit and Remove Columns in your View.

In the meantime, you can watch the full Advanced Finds tutorial from our experts below.

Contact us with any support questions you have, and get the Microsoft Dynamics 365 project support you need here.