The Key to the Treasure Chest in Business Central

OK, so we’ll probably never see a “Pirates of the Caribbean: Business Central” movie, but I have a tip for you that is almost as exciting. You are working in Business Central and you need to find something on a page. Maybe you are on the customer record and need to find the value in a specific field. You don’t know which FastTab to find it and you need to do it quickly.

Your treasure chest of answers and information is just one key combination away. I learned a great tip from a user while attending July’s Mix It Up event. I probably should have already known this, but I didn’t – it just goes to show you can always learn more about using Business Central. I love collaborative events!

Let’s use the Tax Exemption No. as an example. Someone has come to you and asked if a customer has a Tax Exemption No. and if so, what is it. I must admit, until a couple of weeks ago I would have skimmed through the FastTabs looking for the field. Not anymore!

So what did I learn? CTRL + ALT + F1 - it’s called Page Inspection. In NAV it is called About this page. What a treasure chest! With CTRL + ALT + F1, Page Inspection opens to the right of the browser window. Use the search field and type in “tax.” Ahoy Matey! All fields with “tax” in their caption along with the data values are listed. Now you can provide that Tax Exemption No. requested without searching through the customer card.

If you have fields related to extensions, you can see this here. And, if you click on the Extensions tab, all the apps (including base BC and extensions) affecting this table are listed. In our example everything is from the base application.

As you dig deeper into the treasure chest, you’ll find that if you want to see all records in the table, not just one at a time, you can select View Table. A page will open listing all the records and all the fields. (Tip: Open the page in a new window to make it easier to see more of the fields on a page. The first time you do this you may need to change your view from tiles to list.)

You can click on many of the fields on this page to get to the underlying data, however, you will not be able to modify or delete any of the records or data from this page. There are also no actions available from this page - it is for viewing only.

And here’s another doubloon: If you have been looking for the ability to find the time a customer record was last modified (only the Last Modified Date can be found on the customer page), you are in luck. There is a field in the table with this information. The next time you need it use CTRL + ALT + F1, search table fields using “time” to find it. You may find other fields of similar value if you peruse through the data in this way.

Sometimes Business Central applies filters to a list page that the user cannot see or modify, which will cause you to not understand why you are seeing something different than you expect. One example of these is table view filters. You will not see these filters even if you expand the Filter Pane on the page. If you think your list may be filtered in this way, you can confirm it using your treasure chest key Page Inspection. You can see all filters including UserFilters and TableViewFilters by selecting the Page Filters tab.

If you are the Business Central administrator, you probably don’t want everyone to have full access on this page. Not to worry, access is controlled through permissions. To give detail access to users, assign execute permissions to System Object 5330 or permission set or user group D365 Troubleshoot. Without permission to System Object 5330 a user can still access Page Inspection, however, only Page and Table fields with basic details can be seen.

The next time you need to go on a treasure hunt in Business Central to find data on a page, try out Page Inspection. Just remember CTRL + ALT + F1. Shiver Me Timbers!

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