think about IT

Currently there’s a lot of talk about Business Central performance . Microsoft has released and is releasing guidelines, tools about mechanisms to program for performance, analyse and monitor  performance. At the same moment there’s also discussions going on on public and private fora about database size and limitations. And last but not least Artificial Intelligence is also a hot topic, making Business Central smarter, so it can help you in your daily business. And then I suddenly thought about something I did a long time ago, for Dynamics NAV, using C/Side, and I figured, well actually this…

Currently there’s a lot of talk about Business Central performance . Microsoft has released and is releasing guidelines, tools about mechanisms to program for performance, analyse and monitor  performance. At the same moment there’s also discussions going on on public and private fora about database size and limitations. And last but not least Artificial Intelligence is also a hot topic, making Business Central smarter, so it can help you in your daily business. And then I suddenly thought about something I did a long time ago, for Dynamics NAV, using C/Side, and I figured, well actually this…

Here are some interesting aka.ms links I have found: aka.ms/bcideas Dynamics 365 Application Ideas for Dynamics 365 Business Central aka.ms/bccountries Country/Regional availability and Supported Translations aka.ms/collaborate Microsoft Collaborate aka.ms/readytogo The “Ready to Go” Program aka.ms/bclearn Microsoft Learn for Business Central aka.ms/bcproductivity Working with Business Central aka.ms/bckeys Keyboard Shortcuts aka.ms/bcupdates Major Updates of Business Central Online aka.ms/bclastminorupdate …

Try out the new Business Central 2020 release wave 1 functionality today! Learn how to prepare for major updates with preview environments: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/preview-environments Are you interested to test out all the new bells and whistles of BC version 16, then create your preview sandbox as follows. Go to your Business Central Admin Center: Then spin up a new sandbox: Click Yes: Wait a little bit… And voila… Provide feedback on the preview Browse to  aka.ms/collaborate If you have not…

Microsoft has announced the release of Power BI Desktop: February 2020 and you can read all about it here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-february-2020-feature-summary/ I am very happy about incremental refresh, which is now generally available and is now supported for Power BI Pro licensing, meaning it is no longer a Premium only feature! Read all about that here: Incremental refresh is now generally available This is extremely important for all SMB companies who for example are using Dynamics 365 Business Central as a data source for Power BI, because…

Imagine you have created an amazing Power BI report that summarizes information using different visuals. Power BI Desktop lets you build advanced queries, models, and reports that visualize data and the idea is that the individual records that come from your data source are aggregated and summarized in your report, giving you the possibility to see the big picture. Let’s look at an example, where we import information from the GL Entries table in Business Central: Here I created a matrix that displays general ledger amounts by account category, subcategory and name. And as you expect you…

Performance wise it can be very interesting to use query objects as a data-source in a report (or any other object). Imagine you want to create a report that shows the top X records from a table, let’s say for example Customers, then creating a report dataset with a top-x filtering can be very cumbersome. An example is available in report 111 Customer – Top 10 List. Here you see that in order to calculate the top 10 customers, you first need to loop over all customers, then store the top 10 records in a temp table and then loop over the temp table to add its records to the dataset. Imho that…

A question I get a lot in my Power BI training for Business Central, and non Business Central companies is the following: How can I implement an incremental refresh, without building a data warehouse and without buying a Power BI Premium license? And to be honest, the answer is, it’s not really possible, but there’s a workaround. The workaround is an incremental refresh, using a cutoff-date, but this date might need to be manually updated at a certain moment. Let me explain how this works. But before I do that, I should also mention that last week I was enormously pleasantly surprised…

I recently came across a question in the Business Central forum: How do I get information about Posted Sales Shipments in Power BI? And this is not a standalone question, I get these questions a lot in my training’s that I deliver all over the world. Many times I see answers suggesting to use existing list pages and publish them as web services, either manually or using the assisted setup: Setup Reporting Data . And although I like the Setup Reporting Data wizard in Business Central, I don’t like the results, or I should say: the performance . It’s very easy to create new web services using…

Recently someone asked me, what’s wrong with me report, it’s not showing me the correct data? After investigating I noticed that the report used filters, applied in several different ways and that the expected data was not showing up in the dataset, and then of course it was also not displayed in the layout. So, let’s see how you can apply filtering, in the dataset of a report, and let’s do this with a document. A document typically fetches information from two tables: Header and Line. Let’s take the purchase Header and Purchase Line as an example, but the same is also valid for all other…