The NAV user community wants the ability to copy and paste rows in the RTC

As a long time account schedule user, I was pretty excited to see how the role tailored client would change or enhance account schedules. I got my hands on a copy of the Cronus database with the role tailored client and began to test drive my existing account schedules. I discovered a few things that were really great, a few things that were a bit of a step back, but one thing that was a real problem. In the role tailored client, account schedules had completely lost the ability to copy and paste rows from one schedule to another. This was a problem because it was a gigantic efficiency loss in account schedules functionality. Really? Was this such a big deal? Let me give you some examples of how I use this capability which is alive and well in all prior versions of NAV.

1) Creating slightly different versions of a similar column layout. If I create a monthly net change column layout, I can easily create a monthly balance column layout, or a monthly budget column layout, simply by copying the original column layout and changing one variable on the new layout. Copy and paste allows me to create three valuable looks for one report in less than a minute.

2) Testing or trouble shooting a new schedule. I’ll frequently take an existing schedule and change it to serve a different purpose. When doing this, I’ll copy the existing one that I know works, and then paste it into a new schedule to try what I want on it. This ensures I start with setup information exactly the same as the one I know works, so I don’t have to doubt whether I missed something. I can just change what I need for the new schedule and test the new variables one at a time.

3) Section replication. If I have a schedule where I need a section to repeat, I can copy the existing one and paste it in the new spot.

So what do you do in the RTC in order to accomplish any of these things? The answer is:  you have to retype and reselect options for the entire schedule manually. Ugh. Really Microsoft?

I’ve talked to a bunch of folks about this. At first, I thought there was just something I was missing, some new navigational feature that I hadn’t yet figured out. The best story I’ve gotten was that with changing account schedules to the matrix form, they just weren’t able to bring along clipboard functionality. Account schedules isn’t the only area in RTC where the copy and paste ability are gone.

The NAV user community has definitely spoken loud and clear about this. An organization called ilovenav asks users:

“Help us make Microsoft Dynamics NAV an even better product. Please submit and vote on your favorite product suggestions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Our goal is to crowd-source this feedback to Microsoft and pick suggestions that we can develop and distribute to the community free of charge”.

To date, there are 161 votes for this fix, and this is the most requested fix registered on the site.  Matt Traxinger, the admin for the site says, “This has been announced for NAV 2013. It is not known whether they will include it in a service pack for NAV 2009.”

I think users can make a difference in what happens with their product, and I firmly believe that Microsoft is listening.  I see evidence of this again and again in the awesome features they continue to release in the tools we all use every day. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you already know I’m a big account schedules advocate, but I really think Microsoft goofed on this one.

Save yourself a lot of typing and save new NAV users some frustration. Get out there to the ilovenav site and cast your vote for this important product suggestion.