This post is part of the New Functionality In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 series in which I am taking a look at the new functionality introduced in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1.
The 15th of the new functionality in the Application section is use new Excel layouts for 35 selected reports.
Running reports to analyze and present business information is a frequent task in any business. Now you can use the Excel report layouts to interactively generate analyses and present learnings
Enabled for: Users, automatically
Public Preview: Apr 2024
General Availability: Apr 2024
Feature Details
Microsoft have added 35 Excel reports with new report layouts for finance, sales (customers), and purchases (vendors). To give you more options in creating your own Excel layouts for the report, you also get data from the report request pages and data for translations of a layout. If the data in the reports comes from multiple tables, the report layouts show the data in multiple worksheets, which makes it easy to understand where the data originated.
The reports are flexible, and you can use them in the way that best fits your needs:
- Use the reports as-is to get insight about your business.
- Use pivot tables to slice and dice data for analysis.
- Use them as a template to create your own Excel layouts for the same data.
Over the course of 2024 release wave 1 Microsoft expect to add more layouts to cover areas like Fixed Assets, Inventory Jobs (Projects), and Service Management. You’ll find examples, typical use cases, and a description of the data for each report in their documentation.
Note
The Excel reports are limited to around 1 million rows. For reports that have a high volume of data, Microsoft recommend that you use the report request page to filter your data.
My Opinion
Since starting to work with Business Central, I have to admit that I’ve not been very impressed with the quality, or in fact the number, of reports available in the system. This feature may improve things a little, but the reporting standard in Business Central remains quite poor.
I understand more now why third-party products like Jet Reports are popular with Business Central.
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