#D365FO #D365SCM New Features: Grid Personalizations, Saved Views, and User Experience

I’m late to the party, but had a few minutes and wanted to share some insight on some cool new features that have come to D365 Finance, Ops, and SCM over the past few release updates. Most of what I want to focus on are tools for the individual user experience.

How many of us live and breathe by still exporting to Excel to group, summarize, find data that I need to apply a bunch of filters to, or just make it easier to review? Well, there were a bunch of new things thrown in to help with that.

First, let’s take a look at some of the Features I have enabled in my sandbox environment under Workspaces > Feature Management.

Then I’m going to navigate over to the All tab, and apply a filter to find all of the Features containing the word “Grid”

Let’s start from the bottom with “New grid control.” The feature description sounds really promising “This feature replaces the existing grid control with a new control that has faster rendering, smoother scrolling, and less jumping when navigating in the grid. The new grid also allows drag-and-drop column reordering, entry of mathematical expressions in numeric cells, the ability to calculate totals at the bottom of numeric columns, and the ability to get ahead of the system when editing or creating data”

Being able to drag and drop columns more easily and calculating totals in numeric columns??? That sounds amazing. Let’s go ahead and enable that feature! I’ll take a look at the rest and then we’ll run some tests.

Next, we have the “Grouping in Grids” feature. This description also sounds good but leaves me with a question: “This feature, which depends on the new grid control feature, allows users to group data within grids. This empowers users to analyze data and calculate subtotals per group. Grouping can be saved as part of the saved view definition when the saved views feature is enabled.”

Just like the Totals before, this sounds awesome as I can now get subtotals without having to filter on a form multiple times to get subtotals then add up manually. However, it references the “Saved views” feature. Now, if you have not seen Saved views, it’s an enhancement to Personalization that allows users to create multiple saved filtered views of forms. Kind of similar to how the old subfolder system of favorites in AX2012 operated. Here, when you open a form, you can see there is a “Standard View”:

I can see it has a “Save as” button so I start applying some filters. I filter on Product type = “Service” and Product lifecycle state = “Operational” as these are service items that I am responsible for maintaining. I then click on where it says Standard view and use that little “Save as” button, which allows me to name my applied filters, give them an optional description, and choose to Pin it as the default view when opening this particular form:

Really great stuff! It even works with saving the personalizations that included moving columns and such!! Alright, so back to the Grouping in grid. That sounded good, so I enabled that. Let me also go ahead an enable this Freezing columns in grids and we’ll go to a form and test out New grid control, grouping, and freeze columns all together. So, first I’m going to navigate to a form and right click within a column, and I immediately see a couple new options: “Group by this column” and “Freeze column”

Well, I know I want to review a bunch of fields in the Released Product Master, so I right click on the Item number column and select “Freeze column.” Sure enough, I can now scroll left to right while that column always stays stagnant:

Now, I want to try grouping, but in conjunction with the numerical totals feature. So, I will instead navigate over to a form that has lots of numbers, something like Inventory transactions. I’ll right click in a column of the grid, and once again, I see new buttons, the previously mentioned, Group by, and Freeze column options, and also a “Total this column” option. So I apply a filter to only look at transactions that have an Issue status = Reserved physical. Then I right click on the “Quantity” column and select “Total this column.” Boom!!! Instant Math!!

Grouping by also delivered as promised. I was able to Group by the Reference column and get subtotals by Transaction type:

Once again, all really good stuff. Finding these new tools really are what seem like small changes, but optimize the hell out of the user experience and provide tools for each person to really tailor the system and forms to their specific needs.