Blogiversary Top 20 (#2) NAV keyboard shortcuts – Classic to RTC

Posted: April 26, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We’re celebrating our one year blogiversary by reposting the Top 20 Most Viewed in the last year, as determined by you, our readers! Follow this link to see the entire list. Enjoy!

Who knew that keyboard shortcuts could be so darn controversial?

I recently got the chance to present a NAV tips and tricks session at the NAVUG Midwest Regional Chapter meeting, and one topic that came up again and again was what keyboard shortcuts were changing in the transition from the classic client to the role-tailored client (RTC).

The first discussion started as a rumor during the social hour the night prior. “Did you hear they’re getting rid of F8?” “No, they can’t get rid of F8!”  “What’ll we do without F8?”  “Oh my inventory accountant is going to hate that” “Well I heard they’re changing everything.”

Well lucky for us we had quite a few folks there who have already been using the RTC who were able to quite handily put that vicious rumor to rest. F8 is firmly available to copy the field above in the new client, just has it has been in the classic client.

There are quite a few other things that are just simply changing, and I think the changes make a whole lot of sense.

Take F3. F3 has been the constant companion of the NAV user, utilized whenever we needed to designate a new record, a new line, a new document, or a new card. Anything new has been F3. This has been replaced with four new commands in the RTC. Complicated?  No, I think that Microsoft has made a concerted effort to simplify by making keyboard shortcuts more consistent with other Microsoft Office products. Even though four new commands are replacing one, I think that Ctrl+N will come quite naturally to someone wanting to create a new record. Ctrl+Insert likewise makes sense for inserting a new line. Ctrl+Shift+C for opening a new card and Ctrl-F2 for creating a new document may be a little taxing, but I’m betting we’ll all get used to it. Frankly, I’m glad to see Microsoft making it easier and more consistent for new users to adopt.

I’m sure I may utter an oath or two when I hit F3 in the RTC and instead of getting a new record, get bumped into a field filter. But I sure will appreciate many of the brand new keyboard shortcuts that support RTC features that we’ve never had before like Alt+Tab to switch among open windows and F5 which now acts as a refresh command, just like it does in other programs.

Check out the link below which goes to a Microsoft .pdf listing out a nice comparative list of keyboard shortcuts between the classic client and the RTC. This will be the first document I give to my end users when we start working on our transition to the RTC. There will always be fear of change, even with small things like keyboard shortcuts.

Encourage folks to look for the consistencies and efficiencies gained with the new ones and remind them; at least they didn’t get rid of F8.

NAV2009KeyboardShortcuts

Blogiversary Top 20 (#4) Maximize your Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Classic screen space with user level configuration options

Posted: April 24, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

We’re celebrating our one year blogiversary by reposting the Top 20 Most Viewed in the last year, as determined by you, our readers! Follow this link to see the entire list. Enjoy!

One of the first things I do when I get a new person started using NAV is to show them how to customize their screens using different NAV options available at the user level. The NAV defaults start us off with white space in weird places, columns we may not necessarily use, and headers we can’t read. These are all possible to fix easily at the user level, and I’ll share my six tricks with you today.

Today we’re just going to cover the Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Classic client. The Role Tailored Client, with its updated look and feel, is significantly different and Microsoft has done a great job of addressing many of these small challenges with the new client.

  1. Change the size of the main navigation pane. You can do this by hovering on the vertical blue separator bar until you get a double-sided arrow, and then move your pane to the left or right.
  2. Get rid of unwanted menu options. If you’re not using the Jobs or Service Menus, right-click on that item and choose hide. You can always add something back to the menu by right clicking and choosing show.
  3. Increase your header size. Every screen starts out with the header line as one line tall. This means that you can’t read most of the information in your headers. Hover at the bottom of the blank grey box at the top left of the lines area until you get a double ended arrow, then click and pull down to see more lines within the header.
  4. Check your row height. Depending on your preference, you might prefer rows taller or shorter than what is the default. Choose any grey separator bar on the left side of the lines area between two rows and move it up for shorter or down for taller. Your adjustment will be equally sized for all rows.
  5. Change your columns. Make sure to show only the things you need. There are almost always more options available with the default than what you will use in day-to-day transactions. If you have a coworker in a similar role, it may be best to check to see what they use regularly when you’re just getting started. Hide anything you don’t need just by using right-click and hide. Just like with the menu options, you can right-click and show if you want to put something back on your screen.
  6. Make the glued column smaller. In NAV 2009 Classic, on every screen, one column is always designated as the “glued” column. This column is generally the Description column. You’ll know which one this is when you try to resize it to a smaller size and get the error, “You resized the glued column Description, which then expanded automatically to fill otherwise empty space”. This can get frustrating for new users, because it seems there is not a solution. There are two recommendations that I have to get past this.
    1. Place your mouse to the right of the glued column separator, and move from right to left until you get a double-headed arrow. Left click, hold, and aggressively move to the left, farther than where you want to end up. This will make your glued column narrower, but only if you have a bunch of columns off to the right already.
    2. Another way to accomplish this is to add a column that you don’t need to the right and make it really really wide, so that it creates visual white space on the right hand portion of your screen.

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Blogiversary Top 20 (#5) PowerPivot to the People

Posted: April 23, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

We’re celebrating our one year blogiversary by reposting the Top 20 Most Viewed in the last year, as determined by you, our readers! Follow this link to see the entire list. Enjoy!

As a Controller at a small to medium-sized business, I struggle with the big BI question:  do I invest in a business intelligence package or do I do it myself?

When I first became aware of PowerPivot, a free Excel add-on that became available with Microsoft Office 2010, I was excited and also a little relieved. While the emergence of PowerPivot didn’t completely solve my dilemma, it sure gave me some significant options for more data accessibility. I didn’t have to depend on my partner or an IT employee with special skills to build me a dataport from NAV, or to piece together an SQL query, or to build a cube I could apply queries to. Because I have PowerPivot, suddenly I can be Super-Controller; accessing tables directly in my NAV database, pulling ginormous amounts of data into a single spreadsheet, and manipulating the data with lightning speed into familiar Excel pivot tables, all without asking for help.  powerpivotcrush

So, when I read in a recent article from MSDynamicsWorld.com that New Office 2013 Licensing May Put PowerPivot, Power View Out of Reach for Some Microsoft Dynamics Users, I was actually pretty alarmed and then pretty upset. How dare Microsoft give us this shiny new Christmas dream and then snatch it away like some kind of horrible data-reneging Grinch!

I went looking for a few more answers about exactly what was going on, and what I found out was that Microsoft has actually taken PowerPivot out of most versions of Office 2013. This is a big deal because it was previously available in all versions of Office 2010, so Microsoft is actually removing functionality. PowerPivot is only available in Office 2013 if you get Office Pro Plus through volume licensing or through Office 365 subscriptions. Basically, this means PowerPivot is not available in any retail Office 2013 packages, so therefore, is only reachable by companies who have enough purchasing power to utilize volume licensing packages. So, a tool that was designed, in my opinion, to give BI power directly to the people by making it simple enough for financial folks to pull their own data, has now been restricted to only business class licensing. If you’re looking for some interesting theories as to why this might be, read Hey, Who Moved My (PowerPivot 2013) Cheese?

Mr. Excel himself (Bill Jelen), the uberist Excel geek of them all, has some great stuff to say about PowerPivot, including “PowerPivot is the best new feature to hit Excel in 20 years” and a few other things here including a great short video explaining why we should care.  I just said in a recent NAVUG Ask the Experts Finance webinar only two weeks ago that as a financial professional who uses NAV, learning to use PowerPivot should be the most important skill finance people should learn in the next year.

Microsoft has missed a huge opportunity to finally settle a score in the BI arena for small to medium businesses by making this move.  There has always been the argument that using Excel spreadsheets is a risky proposition for financial professionals. You can really create some big problems for yourself if you are not careful in how you manage your spreadsheets.  Some companies even go so far as to outlaw them and attempt to go spreadsheet free.  Companies who sell BI packages lean on this pretty hard, trying to remove spreadsheets from the list of available choices.

I say this risk is greatly offset by the benefit of being able to use a tool that can pull, in a safe way, massive amounts of data that can be manipulated by the typical Excel end-user quickly and efficiently.  For me, the benefit PowerPivot brings to my company tips the scale on sinking money into a BI solution, and keeps me firmly in the DIY BI camp, with Excel as my primary tool. Making PowerPivot available in all new versions of Excel seals the deal and makes BI in Excel a revolution of equality, ensuring equilateral Excel adoption in the business world.

I’m glad to see so many people bringing forward a call to action to bring PowerPivot back to all versions of Office, not just Pro Plus and Office365 subscriptions. I’m adding my voice, and will continue to ask Microsoft to bring PowerPivot to the people!

Dynamics NAV Financials series on dimensions to be published in Spanish

Posted: April 18, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

I am pleased to announce that the recently published blog series 15 days of dimensions will be translated into Spanish and posted over the next few weeks on the blog TodoSobre Microsoft Dynamics NAV! As someone who believes strongly that NAV users need to help other NAV users by sharing our experiences in how to best use our ERP system of choice in our daily work lives, I could not be more excited at this international collaborative opportunity. Many thanks to Laura Nicolàs for reaching out and offering to do the work to translate the entries and make this material available on her blog.

Laura Nicolàs is a Dynamics NAV consultant with more than 9 years of experience. She has been very involved with the Spanish NAV community. She recently founded a new community focused on Dynamics NAV end users, named  www.usuariosNAV.es . She also blogs regularly at  http://todosobrenav.blogspot.com.es and at http://joinnav.wordpress.com. Laura is the author of the recently released book, Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, available from Packt Publishing.

nicolas

Blogiversary Top 20 (#8) 10 easy tips for payment terms success in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Posted: April 18, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

We’re celebrating our one year blogiversary by reposting the Top 20 Most Viewed in the last year, as determined by you, our readers! Follow this link to see the entire list. Enjoy!

1.  Know that the Document Date is what controls the calculation of payment terms. This is true for both vendor invoices as well as customer invoices.

2. The vendor and customer areas share the same Payment Terms setup. Make sure the folks who maintain these tables know they’ll need to share the codes that are set up here.

3.  Basic terms use very basic setup. Payment terms of Net 30 simply require a Due Date Calculation of 30D in order to work.

4.  Immediate payment terms can be accomplished in two ways. The first way is to leave the payment terms field blank on the vendor or customer card. When this occurs, NAV makes the assumption that the payment terms are immediate. The second way is to populate the Due Date Calculation with 0D. By putting in zero days, you can still define a payment term and name it as immediate. I don’t like to see blank fields in any of my data, so I recommend using this method.

5.  Discounted terms follow a specific combination in the payment terms table. For discounted terms like 1/10 Net 30 (one percent discount if paid in ten days, otherwise due at thirty days), use this setup.

6. You may have some things you always pay on the first of the month, like rents. How do you get invoices to show up on your payables aging on the first day of the month regardless of whether the month has 31, 30, or 28 days? In the due date calculation, use this simple formula:  CM+1D.

7.  If you send checks, and you need for that first of the month payment to get in the mail in time to be received on the first, get a little fancier with the formula and use CM-3D. This will calculate the due date as the third to last day of the month, no matter how many days are in the month.

8.  If you need to date something as always due the last day of the month, set up the Due Date Calculation as D31. This will always calculate the due date on the last day of the month, regardless of how many days the month has.

9.  When running the suggest vendor payment process for payables, the last payment date corresponds to the due dates calculated by the payment terms. The date you put in this field will suggest payments to be made with due dates up to and including the date listed.

10.  If any invoice gets posted with incorrect payment terms and you need to correct the due date in order for it to show up properly on your aging, you can go in and correct the due date on the already posted invoice. This can be done from the end-user level and does not require use of the object designer.  Drill down to the correct invoice record from the Balance ($) field found on the general tab of the vendor card.  Use a triple-click with your mouse on the due date field to change the date quickly and easily. The same steps can be accomplished from the customer card.

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