Role Center Charts in Dynamics NAV 2017 - Part 2

(Transcript)

Today, I wanted to talk about charts, again. I just finished a video about charts where we built this chart over here [points out chart] for the Role Center. And I did talk about the limitations, we did a—this is a chart build out of the customer transactions, and it shows the customer balance for a particular sales person, but we could not show the name of the customer because that was not available in that table.

Customer table
I could use the customer table just to kind of reiterate that there are work arounds about some of these things. If I use the customer table instead of the customer transaction table, then I can use the name here and the customer table actually does have balance, excuse me the balance.

Chart View
I'm not going to change that here though. What I wanted to go over in this section is something called Chart View which exists on almost every single list in NAV.

So, if I go here to Customer list. You are probably familiar with this, this is a standard customer list in NAV and you can actually view a list as a chart, almost any list. The only thing I need to do here is just click on show as chart.

Now most of the time when I—this is brought up, it actually comes up empty because you have not set the measures that you want to see. In my opinion, it should come up with some standard measures, hope they change that, but the way it ships out-of-the-box is that it just comes up empty and you have to figure out which measures you want.

And then you have these three tabs over here: a measure over here [points to top left tab], you have a dimension over here [points to bottom left tab], and then you have a dimension over here [point to bottom right tab].

Generic Chart Customization
So the idea is to set these properly so you’ll get something here in the chart. Now, knowing which one is which is kind of hard; it doesn’t tell you, but what you can do is actually right click and hit customize, and you get the same window as we were interacting with in the previous demo (Role Center Charts in Dynamics NAV- Part 1).

And I actually like to work from here because here I can see what is the X-axis¬—what is the x and z-axes and put in a description, things like that. So, for the x-axes I’m quite happy with Name, so I’m just going to leave that on name. For the y-axes I want to see the balance.

So, I'm looking for the same thing as I’m showing on the first page, just the balance in the local currency, like so. And I don't need the z-axes, if I want a 3d visualization, I could, of course, set up a z-axis. I’m not interested in that right now, I just want to see the balance by name of every single customer in there.

So, in this case I’m not filtering for the sales person, like I did before, this is all I want to see [points to the chart customization window]. So, if I hit ok, you can see I now have balances for customers.

Filtering the Chart
Now let’s say if I wanted to do some filtering, I can go in here and click on “limital totals”; just like I would do on a list; and add a filter and with limit totals, just to refresh your memory, I can put in specific filters for like a date range, etc.

So, let’s say, if I only want to see 2018, so in the demo we are always in the feature. So, I’m just going to show 010118 to 123118 [types in filter box] and now that updates. Now we are only looking at particular period.

Adding More Filters
Let's say I want to add one more filter, put in the advanced filter [clicks customer drop down, advanced filter], and I’m going to put the balance to be non-zero [types <>0 in balance filter field]. I’m not interested in the ones that don’t owe us anything.

So, now I’m getting down to like a manageable set of customers. If I wanted to see only Peter Saddow’s (information), I could do that as well. So, I will just go in here and pick up the sales person, in the filter, just so that we do the same thing as I did before. And now we see that [the updated graph]. So, we have balances for Peter Saddow only for 2018 so any old balances before that are ignored, etc. Actually, the thing is, if I put a date filter, there is a field called net change; this is affected by that.

Flipping Between Chart View and List View
So, these are the ones that have any balances incurred in 2018, and they are still remaining for Peter Saddow. So, you can do, like, charting right here on the list. And then If I go back, show as list, you can see the data that I’m working with. Then I can go back and see it as chart.

So, this is fairly useful if you like to see things quickly, visually. And I don’t think people are using this a whole lot. I just don’t think they have gone beyond the step of clicking customize and getting the measurements in there, but if you do, I think you find that you quickly visualize things and you come to quick conclusions because sometimes images tell you a lot more than just numbers.

That’s all I wanted to show in this demo. I’m going to continue on the chart journey; there will probably be a couple more videos. Thank you!