Top 5 Ways to Navigate Dynamics AX

AX is a top of the line ERP system used in the Professional Services and Retail industries. This product is invaluable to helping industries get the full view of their projects from execution to resource allocation. When navigating AX, it is good to have special tricks that will help in getting to places quicker and allow more time to do your actual job. The following are the top 5 ways to navigate AX to maximize efficiency and increase ease of use.

1. View only the modules you need in the right order

Based on security settings, users have all of the modules available on the upper drop down menu and the left hand navigation bar. Through the navigation pane options, modules can be added or removed from view and can be ordered differently. This allows users to have a clear and specific view that maximizes efficiency. To change this setting, click on the upper right hand View dropdown adjacent to the help button and select "Navigation pane options". Inside of the navigation pane form, uncheck modules to eliminate them from view or move the module up or down in the view to change their order. After closing the form, only the modules checked will appear as options and will be in the order presented in the navigation pane form.

2. Create a favorites list

All users of AX tend to have forms that they access more often than others. By placing the forms in the favorites pane, it’s easy to access the forms with fewer clicks. To add a form to favorites, right click on a form and select "Add to favorites". The form will then be accessible in the upper left hand pane. When the item appears in favorites, right click on the item to open the form, rename the form in the favorites pane, to create a folder to group favorites, organize favorites or delete the link from favorites.

3. Organize your views

It can be time consuming moving through all of the data in a form when trying to find specific information in AX. Using filtering and sorting techniques can help find the record with a few clicks. My personal favorite is the Ctrl+G function which adds a filter bar to all of the fields in the view. Using Ctrl+F invokes a filter function that allows for individual filtering of a field. Filters can be assisted with functions such as "*" for a wildcard, "!" for exclusions, and "," to display multiple filters in one set of criteria. For example, "*45*, !145" would populate all entries that include "45" yet will exclude 145 from the list. The placement of the wildcard "*" will limit anything starting with ( 45* ), ending with ( *45 ), or include all that have the entry including it ( *45* ). If using dates, place a ".." between dates to specify a date range. When using numbers or dates, entering a "<" and ">" before the numbers will make the values less than and more than respectively. To sort, click on the field headers in a view and each click with sort ascending and then descending. To rearrange the order of the fields, click and drag the header and place in the desired place. Most forms will preserve your personalization changes of the view for future navigation.

4. Add or remove fields in the view

When navigating forms, AX has default views with specific fields. Tables are linked with views that allow users to add fields related with forms by using the personalization tool. To access the personalize form, right-click on a record and click on “Personalize”. There will be a list on the left-hand side called "Layout" with a list of the fields in the view. It's important to make sure a field inside of the "ListPageGrid" is selected before adding more fields. Click on "Add fields" below the list and select any field(s) from the tables linked to the view and click "Add". The form will allow you to continuously select and add fields until closed. Note that some fields are not meant to be in a view even if there is an option to pull them in. This can occur when there are multiple records for one record line or if there are no relations with the data. If a desired field is not in the personalized form, it means that the tables are not linked and a customization can be done that adds the table to the view if a linkage is available. To remove a field from the view, navigate to the personalize tool, click on fields in the "ListPageGrid" and click "Remove". The view will hold in a majority of the forms so the personalize function only needs to be done once.

5. Exporting information

Exporting information can be good when doing ad hoc reports that aren't preconfigured in AX. Any view, along with its sorting and filtering, can be exported into a different format. Excel is a good place for large amounts of data and can be exported either through the "Export to excel" tool (Ctrl+T), or by selecting records (select all by Ctrl+A) and copy and pasting (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) to another format. The "Export to excel" tool will export the exact view, yet copy and pasting will include all the related information from the view with potential duplicates. I personally use the "Export to Excel" tool when I need to provide a report as-is with formatting, yet when exporting data for analysis I prefer copy and pasting.

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