Tips, Tricks & Thoughts on Microsoft Dynamics GP
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Friday, May 25, 2012 How To & Tips, Report Writer
Here, at long last, is my next-to-last blog post in the Report Writer series. It's not that I've covered everything you could possibly know about Report Writer, not by a long shot, but what I've found is some of the basic information I've shared thus far wasn't as easy to find as the more advanced stuff was. Do you want to know about using VBA with Report Writer? Editing package files? Adding Extender fields to a Report Writer report? There are many things like these that are already covered by the Dynamics GP community. In my last article I will summarize my series and include a few links to other Report Writer resources if you haven't found them already!
Now onto this article... This one is a bit of a hodge-podge of things, there is no particular reason why these are all lumped together in one! The items here probably deserve more in-depth discussion but for the purposes of this blog I just wanted to highlight a few key things about them rather than dig deep into their usefulness.
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Monday, May 21, 2012 How To & Tips, Report Writer
The next in my series of blog posts about Report Writer is a brief article on Custom reports.
Why would you create a custom report in Report Writer? (really... why?) I've done it a handful of times, and don't particularly recommend it (with all due respect to David Musgrave :) ) but there are a couple simple reasons why it makes sense sometimes. The types of reports you would create with it would need to be extremely simple due to the fact there is no end user option for sorting or filtering results and no parameter input.
One: Data Validation. It can be useful to put together a report to quickly view some records that are otherwise not available on a regular out of the box report. This is usually why I use it, and the reports are generally discarded after we've validated and printed what we need. This is my last resort, as Smartlist Builder is my tool of choice for this but if the customer does not own SLB, sometimes this is the next best option.
Two: Time. Sometimes the alternative is another reporting tool, which needs to be purchased, licensed, installed and/or configured; not to mention the matter of distributing the report to the necessary users. Sometimes, if the report is possible using Report Writer, it's quicker and simpler to do it this way. There are so many tools out there, most of the time the best option for the long term is another reporting tool (Crystal Reports, SQL Reporting Services, Smartlist Builder, etc.). There simply is not enough flexibility with Report Writer to do all the things many people want to do with reports but the one thing it has going for it is it's always there ready to go when you need it.
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Thursday, May 17, 2012 Canadian Payroll, Troubleshooting
This is a repeat of an article I wrote in November 2011 with updated information.
Issue #2 in that blog was regarding permissions during the Generate Cheques routine and the message "There is an error in the Transmission Header - Incorrect Length".
At that time, the fix seemed pretty obvious and it worked during testing on Windows 7 machines. I wrote about it, forgot about it, and moved on. Months later I learned the client doesn't use Windows 7 on the machines that they use payroll for (those machines happen to be older Windows XP machines) so the error never came up again and I had completely forgotten about it.
Fast forward to last month and another client of mine upgraded all of their workstations to Windows 7 and the error re-surfaced.
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Sunday, May 13, 2012 How To & Tips, Report Writer
I'm continuing the Report Writer series with a brief article on Sections in Report Writer. Every once in a while I see a question on a forum "my field didn't print and I don't know why!". Hopefully this will help answer that kind of question!
Generally speaking a report will have at least 5 sections to it, in this order:
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Report Header - this prints on the first page of the report only
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Page Header - depending on your settings, this prints on every page or on "page 2" onwards.
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Body - the guts of the report
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Page Footer - same as Page Header, this either prints on the bottom of every page or only on Page 1 to the second last page of the report.
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Report Footer - this prints on the last page only
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Wednesday, May 9, 2012 How To & Tips, Report Writer
Way back in February 2011 (yikes!), I wrote about some Report Writer toolbox items, and focussed on the Arrange tab of tools. Today, at long last, I am concluding that article with some notes and tips on the drawing options (most font options), hopefully clearing up some mysteries.
What are Drawing Options?
These are the options you get when either double-clicking on a text field or graphic field like a line or a box, or using CTRL+D on a data field. There are several pieces to it and options that you have. Here I will describe how they work and how to use them effectively.
If you haven't yet ready my article on formatting text, that may be a good place to start which gives some info I will not be covering today.
When you open the Drawing Options window, what you see differs depending on whether you opened this window from a text field, a data field or a graphic (line, box etc.) field. This screen shot is from a graphical report that I’ve been modifying in this series. If you are in a Text report, every Drawing option is greyed out.
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Friday, March 23, 2012 General Stuff, News
(updated with more information Sun March 25, 2012)
You read that correctly! Microsoft has decided to change the way they work with some of their utilities and tools. Previously there were charges to get access to tools or utilities like Customer Modifier and Customer Combiner (and Vendor, Account, Item etc.). On the partner side, we had to purchase those outside of the normal ordering processes (they weren't "modules" like ordering something like Integration Manager was). They want to streamline that to eliminate some of their Direct Billing policies and that means Dynamics GP customers win!
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Monday, February 20, 2012 General Ledger, Troubleshooting
What I'm posting today is hopefully of use to someone out there who runs into this same problem. Admittedly it's rare but it took me a while to find the answer.
In this case, "I" didn't find the answer, I found it buried in a community forums post from Sivakumar, one of the Microsoft Dynamics GP MVPs.
(Update: include link to Sivakumar's blog)
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Thursday, February 16, 2012 Canadian Payroll, Project Accounting, Troubleshooting
Recently a client of mine has experienced a couple of weird things when we started to configure another Dynamics GP company for them with Canadian Payroll and Project Accounting in action. One of them is definitely something to look out for if you use the Canadian Payroll import processes; the second is more of a head-scratcher type of error where you don't know what the real problem is.
I call these things "gotchas" - I'm not sure that translates into all languages but generally means to me at least, something that "GOT" me, that I wasn't expecting or didn't think to look out for.
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Sunday, January 22, 2012 General Ledger, How To & Tips, Purchase Order Processing
This question came up in a forum recently - not in this exact form - but essentially the question was "where can you change the description of a transaction from a Dynamics GP Receivings Shipment or Shipment/Invoice"?
The short answer is, it's very well hidden but it is there, and most users don't see it and generally it stays at the default value which is "Receivings Transaction Entry". That means if you print transaction descriptions on a Accounts Payable cheque or EFT remittance, that's what you see.
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Monday, January 16, 2012 Smartlist Builder, How To & Tips
This is a very short tip for those who use Smartlist Builder. I must say I see this ALL THE TIME. I hope to expand on little nuggets inside Smartlist Builder in the coming months because there are numerous time savers in there, that people have gone to great lengths to work around manually & unnecessarily!
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