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[John Ondercin]

We have recently moved from NAV50 to NAV2016 and our users are unhappy with the changes to Send to Excel.

In NAV50 when you’d send a page to Excel all the fields that are visible would be transferred to excel (including custom Text Fields).

In NAV2016 only fields in the table are transferred, Page 20 “General Ledger Entries” is the one I’m working with right now.

We have added a few fields that are “Text” (not in the table) and get populated with Customer data within OnAfterGetRecord

I find it very strange that if I use “Send to Word” the fields show???

Anyways, I have explained the CTRL+A, CTRL+SHIFT+C to open excel and Paste but this is not an acceptable solution for my users.

Now I can create a function to simulate the keystrokes to select all and copy, but I’m having difficulty processing the Paste into excel…

Does anyone have any fancy solutions for this dilemma?

I’m open to other suggestions as well…

Thanks in advance

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John Ondercin
Senior Developer
Unilock Ltd
Georgetown ON
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[Kris Ruyeras]

Hi John,

I guess my question would be for us to understand the reason of sending it to Excel. What are they doing with it?

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Kristoffer Ruyeras
Director of Business Technology
Bellegrove Medical Supply
Redmond, WA
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[John Ondercin]

I don’t know many NAV users that don’t use excel for generating sums, pivot tables etc…

I’d love it if I could keep them out of excel but in my 16 years I don’t see them changing!

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John Ondercin
Senior Developer
Unilock Ltd
Georgetown ON
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[Kris Ruyeras]

Hello John,

That makes sense. What some of the organizations I’ve worked with in the past ended up doing, they got Jet Reports (Professional to be exact) for them to have an ability to run those types of reports (connected to live) and scheduled even.

It was definitely a shift as one of those organization came from NAV 4.0. A change management process which took 30-50 days for the users to fully grasp and eventually were very happy with.

That’s just base on my experience by understanding what we were trying to accomplish.

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Kristoffer Ruyeras
Director of Business Technology
Bellegrove Medical Supply
Redmond, WA
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[Jamie Theis]

I use send to Excel often, a simple way to do it is Ctrl + e

The nice thing with using the Ctrl function is for example if you are in an Item Card and use that function it will actually break out each FastTab for you, sometimes this is very helpful and sometimes it take a bit more to find the information you are looking for. From what I have noticed with this function if it is visible I can see it in NAV, with that said I don’t have any modifications that are text only.

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Jamie Theis
Purchasing Manager
Hewitt Docks, Lifts & Pontoon Legs
Nicollet MN
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[Julie Sebo]

Thanks for the CTRL E tip.  Is there a similar short cut key for sending a list page such as vendor list, general ledger entries, etc. directly to Excel?

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Julie Sebo
Accounts Payable Manager
Hal Leonard Corporation
Winona MN
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[Jamie Theis]

Julie from what I have found Ctrl + E will send pretty much what you are looking at within NAV.

Also not as useful but you can also use Ctrl + W to send that information to Word.

I would suggest just playing around with it, it is a very useful tool for looking at a snapshot of the data.

Hope that helps 🙂

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Jamie Theis
Purchasing Manager
Hewitt Docks, Lifts & Pontoon Legs
Nicollet MN
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[Shawn Landers]

I would be interested in the outcome of this. We are on NAV2015 and have the same problem. Until I read this I did not even realize the export to Word would work and Excel won’t. I tried and sure enough, the fields that wont export to Excel are on the Word document.

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Shawn Landers
IT Manager
FoodState
Manchester NH
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[Bill Blomker]

John,

We perhaps have the same issue with some NAV field types when exporting to Excel.  Our resolve was to uninstall the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Add-in from Excel.  Not the best solution because once you’ve done your Export/Import you need to go back in and install.  However it doesn’t take long.

If you have this add-in installed and you think it relates and if you need to know how let me know.

Bill

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Bill Blomker
IT Director
Crest Healthcare Supply
Dassel, Minnesota
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[Shawn Landers]

Just an update, I disabled and removed the NAV Addin for Excel. After doing so the columns that would not export did export properly. Seems like it is an issue with the NAV Addin.

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Shawn Landers
IT Manager
FoodState
Manchester NH
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[Ian Ray]

I might be misunderstanding the issue, but there is the possibility of adding a column to the desired table using “Flow Field” and “CalcFormula-Lookup” to pull the data in from another table. This has disadvantages, most notably performance, but it would allow for the data to be captured by the Export to Excel add-on. For example, if I wanted the “Production Order.Description” column in the General Ledger Entries, I could design the G/L Entry (17) table, I could add a text column, view-properties, FieldClass – Flow Field, CalcFormula – Lookup(“Production Order”.Description WHERE (No.=FIELD(Document No.))). Then, I could edit Page 20 General Ledger Entries and add this new column as a “Rec, Fieldname, (newfieldname).” Granted, in this case, it would only display the description for G/L entries which had a Document No. equal to a Production Order No.

This may not be the absolute best way, but I have done this for some tables, mostly those with much fewer records than a ledger entry table. I have no idea how it would affect performance for something critical.

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Ian Ray
Cypress Grove Chevre
Arcata CA
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[Holly Kutil]

John – I don’t see any mention of Jet Express.  Are you taking advantage of the free Jet software in NAVISION now?  I am a big excel user also and we had Jet activated in NAV 2015 and I love love love it. 

Just another option for those excel lovers out there.

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Holly Kutil
American Ring/NAV Admin
Solon, OH 44139
**Great Lakes Chapter**
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