A birthday announcement – Raw data from Business Central reports to Excel!

According to a post on Yammer dated May 6, 2021 (my birthday), raw report data in Excel will be coming soon to Business Central. This is a big deal and so glad we may not have to wait until 18.2 to get it. Microsoft may include it in a minor update to 18. I really hope they don’t make us wait. This will greatly improve the user experience allowing for what many think should be a very simple interface between Business Central reports and Excel.

Borrowing content from the Yammer post by Kennie Pontoppidan, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, we will be able to select an option on the report’s request page to send data only to Excel. Yes, you read that correctly!!! Selecting the option will NOT send the layout to Excel, just the dataset.

This new capability will not only help when troubleshooting reports, but from my perspective more importantly, we can now get the raw data to Excel from some of the standard reports for further analysis. Especially financial reports where we had to previously, unmerge cells, unformat, resort then remove grouping and totaling rows. All of this just to get to the data we need.  From what is indicated, the first iteration of this export may also contain metadata but the final version will hide the metadata by default. If it does include metadata (in columns,) users will need to do some cleanup to remove it. This should only be temporary and not too difficult. Definitely less difficult than what we need to do now to get to only the data we need. I will take this earlier new functionality with metadata earlier rather than wait for a “final” version without it. Do you agree?

If you have access to Yammer, they are looking for feedback on the actual feature and how and where this should be documented (developer and user.)

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday, thank you Microsoft, happy birthday to me! Thank you Kennie Pontoppidan for sharing this on Yammer. I know this present is not meant just for me so I’ll share!