Using Extended Grid capabilities

With current Update 10.0.16/PU40 we get a very useful tool to make our customers even more productive. Since I’ve read about the new Grid capabilities last year I was very excited to bring this feature to our customers. Why? Because we often get the question like this:

• Can I see how many entires are in this list?
• What is the sum of all my open purchase lines at this moment?
• How many delivery positions are to receive today?
• …

Extended Grid capabilities

The list could be lengthened anyway inside nearly every module of D365F|SCM|C. Till now this is often be done by exporting Data to Excel to calculate a total or to make a pivot table to get this information. It will be easier from now.

Users like to get the answers at runtime and they don’t like to jump away to any other forms, BI Workspaces or a extra report or queries to get this less but worthful information.

With the enhanced grid control we can

• group at every grid column
• group multiple fields (up to six)
• calculate totals for the entire grid
• calculate totals for every group
• see number of lines (count) for the grouping|s and the entire table
• hide the group header description

As we can use grouping now, I just want to place some samples where this feature can be usefull, reduces the steps to get a needed information to do better and faster operations.

Just right click on the column header let you select “Group” | “Ungroup” on Text or Date columns or “Total this column” | “Hide total” on numerous columns.

Grouping at Inventory On-hand

In Invemntory OnHand form we can place the ItemID as a group element. So before we had grouping function we had to modify inventory and product dimension display to see either one summarized on hand values of all site/warehouse or detailed onhand values but not the summarized grand total. At every number field we can switch on to calculate total.

The total of a number column will be dsplayed below the grid as grand total and on every grouping header. Sometime if the grid data are large, “calculate” will be dsiplayed. This means you have to start calculation manual because it takes too long to calculate at runtime so that user expierence shall not slow down because of the calculation.

Master planing sort by vendor and item or item

Another use case for grouping in a grid is to work with the planned orders form. Here it can be usefull to group by vendor or by product or both. So with the new selection option at the group header we can comfortable select the item we want to create the purchase order.

Because we can use grouping in all grids many use cases are conceivable, as for open purchase order lines or open sales order lines to group by

• vendor
• customer,
• Shipping date
• delivery date
• Item
• Product category
• …

or any other useful field for a specific business process, just to get a little information without jumping to another form or to do an export.

One thing I would wish about grouping is to get the option for “Expand all” and “Collapse all” for the in grid grouping. Don’t forget to save your grouped view as a”Saved view”, otherwise you will do it again.

Inline Calculation in the new grid

Furthermore it is possible now to make a calculation inside a number field in the new grid. Just start with a isequal sign (=) and enter your formula inline. E.g. you sell individual cutted material based on a price per square meter, you just enter in the quantity field of a Sales order line

= 48 * 62 / 10000
for rectangular plate of 48,0 cm x 62,0 cm or

= pi * 28^2 / 10000
for  circular plate with 28,0 cm radius

If you have your product measurement not inside a product dimension it is an easy to calculate on the fly at sales order entry.

Typing ahead of the system

The new grid has also a new feature  called “Typing ahead of the system” which means that the validation of entered data is now independet of the line you work, Till now you couldn’t leave the line or form if validation has not been done succesful. As now you can leave the line – may be to go the next line and validation of the first line will be done parallel to your next data input. If the validation of the first line fails, you will be prompted to correct the first input.

Not validated lines are shown in italic, validation errors have a exclamation mark in the second column of the grid and user will be promted to correct the data.

Based on the behaviour it is now possible to copy data from Excel table into a grid. The date will be inserted from the grid cell your cursor is placed and inserted as much rows and columns are pasted in the clipboard. This works fine with Text and Combobox values, with numerous values I has some trouble, I think it was about the regional settings for separator of decimals and thousand.

This post was first released on http://dynamics3654operations.de, further information and more details on Microsoft Docs.