Not sure what to get that special D365 accountant in your life? Waited till the last minute and now you don’t have time to buy a gift? Show your appreciation by passing along this list of journal entry tips. Better yet, send a link to our whole series on shortcuts.
#D365Blogs: the gifts that keeps on giving – even during the holidays.
These example screenshots will be from the general ledger journal form, but are applicable across journal types in D365.
Alt+N – Create a new journal
Alt+N can create a new journal header, and also create new journal lines once the journal lines are opened.
“Manual data entry builds character,” –Joel Leichty “Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions–what we do–that we are happy…or the reverse,” –Aristotle
If you need to paste multiple values into multiple places, WIN+V should be your new best friend. Where regular CTRL+C copies something and CTRL+V pastes that last thing you copied, WIN+V allows you to select from your history if previous items copied.
We’ve previously covered Navigation search (Ctrl+/) as a way to quickly find and access different forms across D365. Action search is a way to quickly find and access different menu buttons within a single D365 form. This can be particularly helpful if the user is looking for a menu item button, but unsure which tab it is located on.
The Action Pane
Let’s start by quickly reviewing the elements of the action pane (the area at the top of a D365 form). The action pane contains menu buttons, organized into tabs, and groups.
Action search can be activated by clicking the magnifying glass next to the options tab, or pressing Alt+Q.
Action Search (in Action)
Typing in action search returns similarly named menu buttons. The returned results display the menu button name, as well as its associated tab and group. This works for menu buttons across all tabs on the form. If buttons are hidden through a personalization or saved view, they will also be hidden in the action search results.
Room for Search Optimization
Action search is handy functionality for users searching for a button, but unsure of it’s location in the action pane. However, the ordering of the search results can still be improved. In the screenshot below, you can see that the top action search result for “hour journal” does return the button for creating an hour journal (the hour button in the journal group), but instead the top results are taken by hour costprice and hour salesprice. I am hopeful that the action search and navigation search results will improve in future releases.
Want to share this action-packed post on social media? Go ahead, make my day.
This shortcut is admittedly more style than substance, but…
If you are using a PC with Windows 10, you can use Cortana’s speech recognition to dictate instead of type your D365 inputs. More information on how to set up speech recognition in Windows 10 is available here.
Win+H will activate the speech recognition bar visible at the top of the screen.
Saying “Stop dictation” will remove you from dictation mode.
Cortana Dictation Power User Tip
The Win+H shortcut can be used in conjunction with the Ctrl+/ Navigation Search shortcut to access any D365 form or workspace with minimal keyboard entry. It can also be used with the Ctrl+F Browser Search shortcut to quickly identify objects on a given page.
While some D365 data has Open in Excel functionality, allowing users to interact with the data through the Excel Data Connector add-in, every list page in D365 can be exported to excel, creating a static download of the data.
Ctrl+Shift+E gets you that excel export in fewer clicks. As a bonus, this shortcut places the selection on the Download button in the following screen, so you can use the Enter button to execute the download.
Ctrl+Shift+E…Enter for a mouse-free excel export of your data.
Export Selected Rows
Only want to export a few selected rows to Excel? Check the desired rows prior to clicking Export to Excel and only those rows will be included in your data.
Export to Excel Power User Tip
The D365 platform now supports exporting up to one million rows of data to excel. With this great power, exercise great responsibility.
Need to export more than a million rows? You should probably look into using a different tool. Excel itself can only handle 1,048,576 rows🙂
On any D365 screen, you can you can enter personalization mode though right-click, select personalize, and then selecting personalize this form. If the options tab is visible, you can also click “Personalize this form” in the Personalize group.
Ctrl+Shift+P is simply a faster way to access the Personalization mode. This can be especially useful when making personalization adjustments for saved views.
Personalization Power User Tips
D365 actually has a full suite of Personalization shortcuts. If you use personalizations frequently, it could be highly beneficial to become acquainted with these. One of my favorite personalization hotkeys is when trying to move the position of a column, I find it much easier to use the arrow keys to move and enter button to set the column than to attempt the adjustment by dragging it with the mouse.
Confirm these shortcuts through the link, as I think this is an experience that will continue to improve.
Ctrl+/ is the hotkey to enter the D365 navigation search located at the top of the page (This used to be the magnifying glass to the right of the legal entity, but in a recent design change the box is not top-center).
The navigation search is helpful if you know the exact name of the form you are looking for. The search functionality here still has room for improvement, so when I’m uncertain about the exact name of the menu item I’m looking for, I tend to favor using browser search (Ctrl+F) to open the desired module and search for the desired menu item.
Navigation Search Power User Tip
The navigation search matches based on the initial letters of each word typed.
Instead of typing “project invoice proposals” to return the Project invoice proposals form, the value “pro inv pro” is sufficent to return the same result. Typing “p i pr” would be an even more efficient way to return this result.
With some experimenting, you should discover a series of truncated search phrases to use in combination with Ctrl+/ that will resolve to your commonly used forms. Your own personal hotkeys!
iamJoshKnox 