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What’s New in the 2022 Platform Updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management: Part 1

Friday, July 8, 2022
Reading time: 6 minutes

As Microsoft continually releases platform updates each year for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management (formerly known as Finance and Operations), it’s important to keep up with the latest features to increase user experience and run your business successfully.

In this two-part blog series, we’re going to go through recently released improvements, as well as take a look at what has been changed in platform updates (10.0.23 – 10.0.26) for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to: 

Vertical Scrolling Workspaces

This is more of a visual change, as workspaces were in a horizontal pattern before and now they are in a vertical and collapsible pattern. This feature was introduced in Platform Update 25 and has been available since April 2022. The main reason for the change was to improve usability and to have alignment with other Dynamics 365 products. The previous horizontal pattern was created to suit the Windows 8 design pattern, which is now obsolete.

Figure 1. Workspace Properties

Vertically scrolling workspaces are now more comfortable to use. If you look at some of the standard workspaces, you will see that the form pattern version has changed to 1.1. That’s how you can distinguish if it’s already upgraded. In addition, workspaces are now vertical and collapsible.

Figure 2. Workspace Old Design
Figure 3. Workspace New Design

Above you can see the difference in how workspaces looked in the past and how they look now.  As you can see, the old design is kind of crowded and it’s more difficult to see the provided information. Now (figure 3. the new design) it’s tidier and you can even collapse tabs that you don’t want to see.  When it comes to selecting migration tools for your custom workspaces, it depends on what kind of solution you have. Therefore, I will go through some options that you have to keep up with this change:

  1. Run a BP fixer tool command

If you have more than one workspace, we recommend running a BP fixer tool command. Just put it in the command prompt and it will migrate automatically. However, you will need to make some additional changes as well. In particular, for group controls in the link sections and for form part controls, you will need to make some additional changes. Keep that in mind because otherwise it might not look the way you wanted.

  1. Manually update the forms

Another approach to migrating to the new version is by doing it manually. If you remove the old pattern and sub-patterns for the form and select the operational workspace pattern again, you will have the newly updated version. In case that pattern does not suit your needs, you can always just adjust some form control properties manually.

One thing that you should take into account is that if you’ve made some changes to the existing workspace, you might start getting compilation errors. These can be resolved by opening the extension of the form and pressing save.

New Grid Control Capabilities

This one is more useful for functional consultants or people that do a lot of testing and enter a lot of data. This feature was introduced in Platform Updates 25 and 24 and has been available since April 2022. It was made to improve productivity and make the views that you see in the grid more interesting. To disable new grid capabilities for a certain form you must add the following code after super() in the form’s run() method:

By entering this code, the old view will be available again. This will be useful for you if you experience difficulties or issues caused by this feature.

Paste multiple values from Excel

What does it do exactly?

Figure 4. Values from Excel

The first thing I try to do is copy and paste those values from Excel. As you can see in Figure. 7, I tried that on the sales order. I had two columns – quantity and unit – so I entered the quantities I wanted and the price and then I pasted it from Excel, and that was exactly what I was hoping for. Another thing to keep in mind is that if you have only two lines, but in the Excel you have three lines, pasting them will create an additional line, so you can even create multiple lines that did not exist previously.

Different line status

Another thing that you should keep in mind is that there’s a new column that basically describes the status for that line when you’re pasting the values.

Figure 5. Grid Status


It has four statuses with different meanings:

New grid capabilities

Another feature that was introduced is grouping by column (1). I used a sales order as an example again, and in this scenario, I tried grouping by the item number. You can see that I had three lines – two of them were the same item number so they are grouped, and this comes in useful when you total the quantity or amount (3). In this case, I tried totaling the quantity and the net amount, and you can see that the grouped items have their total.

It’s a similar experience to Excel or SSRS reports, so it gives you more information than you would usually have. And the last one is the freeze column (2) which behaves the same way that it does in Excel – you would freeze one column and you could go to the right, and it would be in the same place.

Figure 6. Grid Capabilities

Evaluating math expressions

You can now enter math expressions and it calculates the value automatically:

Figure 7. Match Expressions

We hope that with this blog we helped you discover some of the newly released features that will make your business even more successful and efficient with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management!

While enjoying the greatest features that new platform updates bring, don’t forget to ensure that your solution is up-to-date and the system is secured and functioning properly after required updates by requesting our subscription-based Solution Maintenance Service now!

Read part 2 of this two-part blog series to continue finding out what are the newest and greatest features in the platform updates 2022!

Don’t forget to contact us via email service@companial.com in case you have any questions as we’ll be more than happy to help and exceed your expectations!

Edgaras Radvilas