A few weeks ago I posted on what I believed were going to be the most exciting new features of the then soon to be released NAV 2013. Well, my predictions held true – I happened to have missed a ton of great new features that I recently discovered while working on the newly released NAV Beta 2013. But rather than give another generic list of features, I’m going to try to walk you through what’s new under the hood of NAV 2013 with screen shots and hopefully illustrate how it can be optimized while working with a client or your own company!
1. User Productivity Enhancements
- Copy and Paste between Excel and Dynamics NAV
- You are not only able to copy rows from Dynamics NAV to Excel, but you can also paste rows from Excel back to Dynamics NAV, which is really handy when you need to copy a few rows of setup data without even running dataport/xmlport/data migration tool. I tested this feature on a sales order by just copying a few rows from Excel with 4 fields Type, No., Location, Quantity, it works great as long as the first 4 fields match the fields on the Excel rows. The fields are also validated after when pasting.
- One click to select all lines in a grid
- How I missed this convenient feature from the Classic Client in the old days! Now we have it back to the Windows Client (RTC), nice! I recalled one of our NAV 2009 customers needed to select all the lines (over 300 lines) and process them all at a time, either he has to select the lines shown on the screen, process them, and select another batch of lines shown next to process them again, or he has to hold the Shift key to page down, down and down to reach the bottom. Now, in NAV 2013, he just needs to click on the left top corner block like in Excel to select all lines in a grid.
- Action Pane changed to Ribbon
- The Action Pane has been replaced by Ribbon similar to the Ribbon in Office 2010 which optimizes the utilization of the screen real estate. The ribbon is organized into tabs and groups, which provides easier access to the commands in context.
- Chart in Fact Box:
- You can add chart to a Fact Box in a Page. Other than the cues on the Role Center, Chart Part on a page, you can also now add the chart to the Fact Box, business visualization everywhere. You can even hold on the Shift key, scroll your mouse wheel to zoom in and out the chart.
- Actions menu is shown directly on the Fact Box, which makes it easier to access to the commands in context.
2. Development/IDE enhancement
- XMLPort is runnable from Object Designer
- You can run XMLPorts directly from Object Designer through Dynamics NAV Server. This means we don’t have to write code to test the XMLPort import/export result.
When import is performed in addition to insert new records, you can also update existing records by specifying the new properties: AutoSave, AutoReplace, and AutoUpdate.
- Table Key List in C/AL Symbol Menu (Shortcut Key F5 in C/AL Editor)
- As a developer, you often need to set the right key before filtering, design the table and check the key and copy over to your code, and then add additional quote and quote to most of the key fields if they have a special character in the field name. Now this is all accomplished by just hitting F5 and by clicking Ok. The key is copied over and immediately performs all the tasks described above for you.
3. Administration Enhancements
- NAV Server Administration Tool
- A new visual server administration tool is added in NAV 2013 to configure the Dynamics NAV Server. It’s an MMC (Microsoft Management Console) snap-in, which is familiar to most of the IT Pro.
With this new tool, you can check the server status, server configuration, start/stop the NAV Server services, or even add additional NAV Server instances.
- PowerShell
- You may manage the NAV Server through the following PowerShell Commandlets too, which NAV Server Administration Tool is implemented on top of:
- Get-NAVServerUser
- New-NAVServerUser
- Remove-NAVServerUser
- Rename-NAVServerUser
- Get-NAVServerPermission
- New-NAVServerPermission
- Remove-NAVServerPermission
- Set-NAVServerPermission
- Get-NAVServerRole
- New-NAVServerRole
- Remove-NAVServerRole
- Get-NAVServerUserRole
- New-NAVServerUserRole
- Remove-NAVServerUserRole
- Rename-NAVServerRole
- Export-NAVServerLicense
- Import-NAVServerLicense
- Get-NAVServerClientConnection
- Remove-NAVServerClientConnection
- Get-NAVServerInstance
- New-NAVServerInstance
- Remove-NAVServerInstance
- Set-NAVServerInstance
- Get-NAVServerSettings
- New-NAVServerSettings
- Set-NAVServerSettings
