User Productivity Enhancements in NAV 2013

It has been more than a quarter since the latest version of Dynamics NAV 2013 has been launched and it’s time to take a look into some of the exciting new features and enhancements that I feel is going to make NAV more user friendly.

 1. Finding and Filtering Enhancements:

We can use Find and Filters on lines of any page. This will be useful for End-users to look for a specific line.

 Advantage

In previous Versions of NAV, users need to look for Actions and use the Select Filter to view records based upon value specified, which many of the users have found difficulties in using.

Now, the filtering option is more visible in the Ribbon, so it is easy for the users to know these features and can make use of it effectively.

For Example: In a Sales Order Document, on a sales Line, we can Find and Filter the lines.

Find: Click the Find button. The screen similar to the below image will open. You can find any field values. For Example: I find the name LINDA, in the No. column. So I used “lin” and the cursor will point to the specified line.

Filter:  Click the Filter Button or press Shift+F3, choose Add Filter, select the field that you want to filter, and then type a value to filter in the Type to filter box.

Clearing the filter is using Clear filter Button next to the Filter Button.

 

Difference b/w find & filter: Using find will only point the cursor to the specific line. The filter in-turn will display only the filtered value based on the condition specified


2. Ribbon
Action Pane has been redesigned to Ribbon. Press Ctrl+F1 for toggling (expanding or collapsing) the ribbon. The ribbon is organized into Tabs and groups

In Nav 2009 the Action Pane equivalent of the Ribbon was not present on the Role Center Pages

Nav 2013:

 

In prior versions, the commands related to the Page are not visible to the user when working as Actions Pane.

The ribbon is also available across all pages

Advantages

In Nav 2013, Microsoft overcome this issue and make the commands are more visible and access easily. The ribbons in NAV are similar to the Ribbon in Office Tools (Like Word, Excel).


3. Copy/Paste Rows between Dynamics NAV and Excel
Here is one very important/key feature that I feel is included with NAV 2013 that is going to make users work very simple.

In previous versions of NAV we need to write dataports to load bulk of similar data. Now, instead of Importing and Exporting to excel, we can directly use Copy and Paste Rows without using dataport/xmlport.

Advantages

• Reducing the use of separate Objects for exporting and importing.
• Save the time
• Easy access
• This functionality is similar to normal Copy and paste in Excel.
• This will be helpful for the clients who needs only limited no. of rows

For Ex: In the Sales Line, the client needs only Type, No., Quantity and Location, they can easily copy from Navision and paste it as Excel.

 

 

4. Select All Lines:

Here is another key area that is addressed with the latest release, selecting all the lines in a grid is now possible in Dynamics NAV 2013 like Excel. The user needs a Single click in the top Left Corner to select all rows from the screen
 

 

In Previous version, there is no such facility to select the Rows, every time the user manually needs to hold the Shift key and select the records.