Transcript
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Welcome everyone to another episode of Dynamics Corner, the podcast where we unearth the excellence of Business Central.
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Whether you're a seasoned expert or just starting your journey into the world of Dynamics 365, this is your place to gain insights, learn new tricks and hear from industry experts.
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I'm your co-host, chris.
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And this is Brad.
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This episode is recorded on June 5th 2024.
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Chris, chris, chris, we're coming up with half a year done.
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Half, that's quick.
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This year is moving, it's moving quickly and I liked what you said there Excellence, see, I like that Excellence.
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With us today, we did learn some excellent tips and tricks for using Excel analysis views and pivots within Business Central.
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Today, we had the opportunity to speak with Tassar Ansbach.
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Good morning, hi.
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What are you doing?
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It's nice to see you.
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Did you switch your office?
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Fantastic.
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I just move things.
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I get bored, so then I move all my furniture around.
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It's an awful habit.
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I think you shifted.
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You shifted, I did.
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And I still thought, when you joined that with the chair, I thought you were wearing a.
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What do they call those With the princess?
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And they wear the, not the veil.
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What's it called With the thing in the back?
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You know, when you have something on your head and then it has, like the.
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Like the train thingy.
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Well, yeah, I don't know what it is but I thought you had what is the word?
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I don't know.
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See, chris, do you know?
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I don't know what you're talking about.
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You don't Do you know when, like someone is wearing.
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They have like something on their head, like whether it be a crown or another device, and then it has like silk or something hanging from the back, a cloth.
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See what is that called.
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It's a veil right.
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Is it the same thing as a veil?
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I was going to say a veil, but I thought a veil went over the front.
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It's like you're wearing a tiara with a veil on the back.
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Okay, so it is a veil, then We'll call it a veil.
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Okay, but do you want to know what I bought and I have yet to use?
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yes, look at this.
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Oh, those are the best things, man, I bought and purchased a bug assault.
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I have yet to use it other than one shot into the sink, into a bowl of water, to see what it comes up with, and because we have some crazy bugs here.
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I had one bug that I saw, but I left this in the garage because that's where I mostly see the bug.
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So I figured if I'm out there it will be available.
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Yeah, so I can pick it up and just use it.
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Because what happened is I saw something in here in the dining room and this was in the garage.
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So by the time I went to the garage and came back, it was gone.
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So now I carry this with me everywhere you need a holster, so you need a holster for it.
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I will let you know after my first shot, but I've had this for about a week and I have yet to use it.
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You know, I even went outside to try to find bugs and I usually see 4.6 million bugs a day.
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Yes, 4.6 million.
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I went out for like 20 minutes and I didn't see one they probably saw your amazon box.
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And then they're like ah, I'm out of here, so I think just purchasing this has now removed all of the bugs Dude that would have been helpful for you.
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In that one podcast recording where you like looked to your right or made some noise, and I remember you texting me saying there's a massive spider up against my right side, and it was during the recording, which is hilarious at the same time.
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Yes, yes, there was a huge spider on the wall and I was watching it and I didn't want to get distracted doing the recording, which is hilarious at the same time.
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Yes, yes, there was a huge spider on the wall and I was watching it and I didn't want to get distracted during the recording.
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Oh God and then, it disappeared and I have no idea where that spider went.
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But there's some large spiders here.
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But good morning the house pet now.
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Well, I go a couple ways with spiders.
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I mean, we have some vicious spiders here and some large spiders, but spiders keep the other bugs out, so you have to have a balance.
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And the other thing that I'm a big fan of in the backyard dragonflies.
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Dragonflies are very good for your yard, so I'm doing some things to try to promote the dragonfly population in my area, along with bumblebees, hummingbirds and butterflies.
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With that good morning, I'd like to thank you for taking the time to speak with us.
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I am excited to talk with you about what we're going to speak about, but before we jump into that, would you mind telling everyone a little bit about yourself?
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telling everyone a little bit about yourself.
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Yeah, my name is Tasha Anspaugh and I have recently went independent and my company is Dynamics Maven Consulting LLC.
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So I do a lot of contract work, focusing more on business analysis, training on Business Central and trying to streamline processes and give end users the power to do things themselves without having to call a developer or have a partner help them with everything that they need.
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So that's me.
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That's great.
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Congratulations on your independent adventures, and I think it's great to have individuals such as yourself available for customers as well as partners to use as an additional guide or implementation specialist to help them with their journey, because I think that's important now with the popularity of the product and a lot of the information that is on there, and with that we're going to have a great conversation today.
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Great title, which I stole from one of your sessions at a recent conference.
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I don't know if you picked up on that or not, but do you remember the topic?
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It's unearthing, the excellence.
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Yes, yes, excellence, excellence, it's unearthing the excellence.
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Yes, yes, excellence the excellence.
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I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you, to talk with you about all things business central analysis and I took the title from one of your sessions at a recent conference From Spreadsheets to Superpowers, unearthing the Excellence of Business Central Analysis Views, pivots, excel Reporting and other stuff.
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Other stuff the pivot tables I just went through with somebody the use of the analysis views and the pivots.
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That, to me, saves so much time and affords a user of the application much more flexibility to analyze and review their data.
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Because I was just speaking with someone and they said well, I'd like to see that as a summary, I don't want to see all those detail lines.
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And I just went and they saw it summarized.
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It was a sales information summarized by customer, by item, and I could see the total for the quantity and the sales.
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And we didn't have to do anything and they exported it to excel and they were done where years ago we would have, you know, had to do something for them to, you know, have a consolidated view, whether it be a paper report or an Excel report.
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So with that let's jump into Tasha's tips, tricks and wonders for excellence.
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I like that excellence With analysis views, pivots, spreadsheets and more.
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Okay, so first question.
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You're asking me a question.
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Yes, okay.
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Asking you a question have you seen the Analyze Features with Copilot?
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Yes, have you seen how to do it?
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Because, holy cowballs.
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I have seen it, but if you have some tips and tricks, I would appreciate you sharing them with us, because just because I have seen it doesn't mean that I'm using it properly, nor does it mean I know all the tips and tricks.
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There's a lot of information flowing about the application, a lot of features being added at rapid pace and it's tough for everyone to keep up with it.
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So if you would share some of your analysis views with co-pilot tips and tricks, I would be excited.
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Yeah, absolutely, how do I share my screen?
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Oh?
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if you look at the bottom of the screen, there's a button called share.
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Oh, that makes sense.
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That seems like a really good place for it.
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I promise Technology kind of.
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No, it's a different platform than a lot of people use, I understand.
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We do have that question often.
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Is this where we're going?
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Yes, oh.
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So what you're sharing for us now is you have a Business Central online screen.
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We were logging in weeks to see our main.
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I call it dashboard when we log into our company.
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Yes, I call it dashboard when we log into our company.
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Yes, so I think my favorite thing so far that I have been able to kind of play with and tinker with as far as the analysis feature is just the ability that, like a lot of times, people are like this is what I want, but I don't know how to drag and drop all of the features, so this is one that I threw together last night by using Copilot.
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I just told it what to do, so you built an analysis or an analyzer.
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What is it?
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Analysis view is the old.
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Put together the tables and the fields and it creates a view Correct.
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This is what's the proper name for this Analysis view.
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Yes, this is an analysis view that I've built with Copilot inside of Business Central.
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So you told Copilot to build this.
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In essence, I call it a pivot table just for shorthand, because I think a lot of users are comfortable with the word pivot table from using Excel, and that's similar to what this is.
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Yeah.
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So you created a new analysis view using Copilot.
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How did you do that?
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So they added the option up here, the little Copilot guy inside of any list view page, and all you have to do is click on it and it opens up, basically a prompt box and asks what you want to do.
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So what is the field layout that you want?
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You just tell it what you want.
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So if you just want to see your balance sheet accounts, so which information we analyzing?
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here you're analyzing the general ledger.
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General ledger entries Yep.
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So we're analyzing the general ledger entries and you clicked on the.
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You started a new analysis view, or did you start it directly from the general ledger entries page?
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What's?
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the first step Straight from the general ledger entries page.
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So I went in to general ledger entries, clicked on the cute little copilot icon and then selected create new view.
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Speaking of that, do you know?
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Someone explained to me that the icon is supposed to be two hands, like in, like, holding each other like this, and that's what the copilot icon is.
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I don't know the validity of it, but someone told me that, and now, every time I see that, that's what I see.
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It's like, it's like not pure hands, but it, but it's like you know you think of it's two hands cupped together it's like two robots.
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Oh yeah, it's like two robot hands with solid fingers, I guess but I don't know how true that is, or uh, or not, but that's what was explained to me.
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Okay, so now we open up the co-pilot.
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We have a prompt.
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Do you see it now?
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It's like Wally hands.
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If you ever watch Disney and you know how he has that claw hands and just like does this.
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Okay, so you opened up the co-pilot prompt dialogue from the general ledger entries page, and now what are you typing?
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I'm going to type what I want it to create for me.
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So if I just want to see my balance sheet accounts, um, with document type and document number, it'll create that.
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You just push create and it does exactly what it thinks you're supposed to do once it prepares it.
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But it's creating that analysis for you.
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You're just telling it what you want to see and it'll create that value for you.
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So it creates a base analysis view with the information that you typed, correct.
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So if I want to add, amounts.
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Oh, get rid of that.
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Okay, add amounts.
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Yep.
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So you can append to it, so you can start with analysis view and it says okay, I got the three fields I want.
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I can add more columns.
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Correct and you can just keep adding to it.
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So keep adding the detail until you get it to look the way you truly want it to.
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So, again, keep adding stuff in there and then, once you like it, you just hit keep and it will show you all of your stuff.
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And I do have filters in there based on the fact that it is a balance sheet account only.
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So if I want to delete, that filter.
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It will summarize those to zero for the period of time.
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I have a couple of questions on this.
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Yeah, I'm not certain.
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This is to both of you.
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Is there a cost to using this for a customer?
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Does anybody know the licensing for this, chris?
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This is just part of the product right now.
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Yeah, it's part of the BC, your BC Essentials license.
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With your BC Essentials license you have access to use the Copilot Correct.
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Now analyzing general ledger entries, does it honor dimensions?
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Because dimensions are variable, right?
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So if you think you have the standard departments and projects, I think that's in the Cronus data.
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It's been a while since I looked at the dimensions that are in there.
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So on our general ledger, could we summarize by department and project?
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I don't see why not, it's just filtering their dimension values, but the captions are dynamic, so is Copilot truly analyzing your data or does it know the table structure from Business Central See Well now I don't know, we should try it.
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Yeah, we should try it.
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Yeah, you should try it, because you could ask dimension one or dimension two rather than department.
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But a user may not know it's dimension one or dimension two.
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They may know that.
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Okay, I would like to see my financial information summarized by business unit, department, project, region or any other dimension that they have.
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That is true.
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This will be interesting yeah.
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So if we want to analyze general ledger entries, do you want dimension values as row groups?
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Let's give it a shot.
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Okay, and minor department.
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I think you could even say group by departments or something like that too.
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Let's group by department and project code yes, yeah.
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Okay.
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Let's see what it gives you.
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Oh, it can't push enter, it doesn't like that.
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Okay, let's see what it gives you.
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Oh, can't push enter, doesn't like that.
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But yeah, there's oh, go ahead.
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I was going to say this is very helpful for those that it's easier to just type up what you're looking for than trying to scroll through all the fields and choices.
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Very helpful.
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This would have been helpful for the phone meeting that I had prior to this call, because what I ended up doing was showing the analysis view on how I was able to drag and drop the fields and then do the summary.
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This would have been beautiful for me to demonstrate how you could simplify the creation of this analysis view.
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So it did group it by your department code and project, because you asked for project as well, it's nested, so it does honor the dimension captions.
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Yes, that is.
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It is really cool.
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That is really cool.
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It's a definite time saving.
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Now these analysis views you can save.
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Yes, and it will automatically save them for you once you hit keep.
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So I'm going to pivot this one real quick with posting year and posting month as columns.
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So you just typed pivot with posting year and posting month as columns and this goes through and changes the analysis view.
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See, we're progressing to where everybody can soon we'll just have to think.
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I mean because these are popular views that users often need to look at from the financial point of view, also from the inventory point of view, if you're looking at, or project point of view, if you're looking at other information from other ledger entries.
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Now these are viewed and now from here you can export this to Excel.
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From here you can copy the link and share it.
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Oh, so you can actually share the view.
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The view yes.
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I don't believe you can Excel export it yet though, which is sad, but hopefully it's coming.
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So you can give them the link to another user and then this view will be added to their view.
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Yep, it will open up exactly what you're seeing right now.
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The other really cool thing is you can share this and then you can embed this analysis view inside of Teams for users who may not have a Business Central license.
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They just need to be able to see so if they're using that M365 license you can embed this and then they can just view it.
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Like on Teams.
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We just have one world, like all these products are becoming one.
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Soon I see that you'll be able to go into Excel and then open your Business Central data easily.
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I know you can link now with APIs and pull in some information, and I mean there are ways to do it.
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But I'm even saying I believe that it will be simplified even a bit more where you can do something like this in Excel.
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They're living up to the name.
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What's the name?
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Business Central Central.
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It's everything right here.
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Yeah, it is so it's going to be.
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Is it going to be Microsoft Office Central or Microsoft Business Central?
00:19:56.808 --> 00:19:57.354
That has everything.
00:19:58.154 --> 00:20:03.844
It'd be Business Central Because, remember, they're you know're adding a lot of stuff around here.
00:20:04.767 --> 00:20:16.384
They are what other tips and tricks do you have for us to live up to this name of our excellence in reporting?
00:20:17.154 --> 00:20:18.561
Oh, didn't need to click on that.
00:20:18.561 --> 00:20:23.938
Have you seen the new excel reports that were pushed out with the newest release?
00:20:26.221 --> 00:20:30.367
uh, I don't think I have, I don't know, in demo.
00:20:30.669 --> 00:20:37.748
Let's see it okay probably gonna have to reshare a different screen, but we'll try it out.
00:20:37.748 --> 00:20:39.076
Okay, so it's downloading.
00:20:39.076 --> 00:20:40.357
It's generating all of my rows.
00:20:40.357 --> 00:20:49.137
I'm going to be pulling the trial balance and budget because I love budgeting as well, so let me.
00:20:49.137 --> 00:20:52.006
Oh, that's easy.
00:20:52.006 --> 00:20:54.221
It even has a button where you can change the share tab.