If you are like me, you may remember the menus in NAV and wonder where the equivalent is in Business Central. Or, you may have never used NAV but would like somewhere to search for content organized by functional area in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central – you know, a menu.
The Role Explorer
In Business Central, we have menus, and they are Role Explorer. Role Explorer can be accessed by the “hamburger”, yes you read that correctly, hamburger icon to right of the top Navigation Menu in Business Central. When you click on this link, it opens a page listing all pages and reports you may need to access based on the profile assigned to your user. What this means is that if you are assigned the Business Manager profile, your explorer will organize and list pages differently than if you are assigned the Inventory Manager or the Sales Order Processor profile.
Finding a list of reports
One of the questions I am asked most frequently is “What reports are available to help me in my role?” To answer this question, I will show users how to take the Role Explorer to the next level. From the Role Explorer, select Explore more roles. From the page that opens you can filter the results to Reports & Analysis. The resulting lists provide “canned” reports and analysis reporting tools by functional area. This may be easier to use than System Search because you don’t need to type key words in to get results like you need to when using System Search.
Using Find in the Role Explorer
In addition to filtering the list results by All, Administration, or Reports & Analysis, Find can be used in the Role Explorer. Even though we don’t need to use key words to get lists of reports in Explorer, we can use Find to type in key words such as “Vendor” to narrow down results. Menus with results will be bulleted when collapsed. Expand the menus to see the items highlighted by find results.
Back to basics
Business Central does have a menu, it is called Role Explorer. Use the hamburger icon to open it and “Find” to search using keywords. It really is that simple, just don’t forget that it is there!
