Greetings everyone! Yes, it’s been a while, my apologies. I’m struggling with motivation to write and hoping it comes back soon! Today I wanted to post a short blog on a support issue I had today. It is something that I can find a couple of references to online, but not many, so that tells me it’s worth it to share my experience and validate some of the other threads that confirmed the solution. Brief background What made this particular situation SO WEIRD is it happened to a user who (a) has been with the client’s company for several years, (b) does not have any new equipment or change to the ..read more

I’m happy to share that I have been renewed today for the Microsoft MVP award, my 6th award. I am still a little shocked, as I truly did not believe I was consistent enough this past year with my contributions. I am grateful as always to the MVP Program team and Betsy Weber for believing in me. I do hope to get back to my “normal self” one of these days and be a more-frequent contributor and blogger again ..read more

Today’s #TipTuesday post is a pretty short one. A client of mine recently merged with another firm and part of that was everyone getting new email addresses for a new web domain. For most of the users that used email functionality in GP, it was a non-event: they simply logged into the “Exchange Log On” prompt with their new email and password and continued with their task. For one user, however, they were stuck in an endless loop of “Login Failed: check your login information and try again.”. In this case, the user had gotten married and had a name change so their Exchange profile had numerous ..read more

Today’s post is short-ish and sweet. In my last post, I documented where to go to get registration keys. In the last part of the post, I had added a note that was specific to Canadian Payroll and today learned that it no longer applies, at least not for recent versions of Dynamics GP. I have edited that part of the post now… This post is a very brief overview of the 2 things that need to be done in a company in Dynamics GP where you want to use the Canadian Payroll module. At some point I may start a series on more topics around Canadian Payroll but for today, it’s just two things you may want ..read more

This is a short post. I went looking for a customer’s registration keys and could not remember how to get to them now that the old CustomerSource links are dead and buried. So… future “me”, this is your reminder! And for those who stumble across this, you’re welcome, I hope the info stays “correct” for the next few years so I don’t have to look for this again! NOTE: I am not covering what to do if you cannot log in, that is outside of the expertise I can provide! If in doubt, contact your partner, and ask them to set you up as a professional under your account so you can log in. CustomerS ..read more

Today’s post is combining the topics of the previous two posts and moving into Power Query to connect to SQL directly instead of connecting to static, exported SmartLists or flat files. The previous posts in the series are: Introduction Starting from scratch Data Access What this post covers In this post, here is what I am going to show, in the context of the Payables Transactions type of information I showed in the first post on starting from scratch. I won’t keep repeating Payables as the example forever, but I do want to show how the underlying view is identical to the SmartList. This wil ..read more

This is the third post in the series and I am going to dedicate this post to how to access GP data in terms of describing some of the options and factors to consider. Very little of this will have “how to” information about Power Query, but I will continue that in the next post. The previous posts in the series so far are: Introduction Starting from scratch In my last post, “starting from scratch”, I was using exported SmartLists as a data source in order to demonstrate that we don’t necessarily need to connect Excel or Power BI to our SQL data directly. While that approach works, it’s cumbe ..read more

The first part of my series around Power BI, Excel & Dynamics GP begins with some of the basics, and a way to start learning Power Query, literally starting from scratch. From my experience, an audience that is often overlooked are users who want to learn more or improve their skills but doesn’t know where to start, and everything they find starts at a point they don’t understand or can’t get to. For example, this post starts without getting into directly accessing data from SQL, which admittedly adds a level of complexity that some users have trouble getting past. Most of the rest of this ..read more

This is most likely the shortest #TipTuesday post I will ever create! I was playing with a SmartList to prep for my upcoming series on Power BI, Excel & Dynamics GP. I stumbled across something I have never seen before: I tried to add too many columns to a SmartList! Here’s the message I received. Apparently, 189 columns is the most you can display in a SmartList (if I’m reading the message literally, it says “Please reduce the number of display columns to less than 190.”) Who knew?! I was just goofing around with the Receivables Transactions SmartList and yes, temporarily I was trying to ..read more

Soon I will be starting a new series of posts around Dynamics GP and how to get data out of it with Power BI or Excel via Power Query. There is no shortage of reporting options available for Dynamics GP customers, with many ISV (3rd party) products out there to augment some out of the box options (Report Writer, SmartLists). However, as with accounting departments everywhere, there is a heavy reliance on Excel as the “go to” tool for reporting and data analysis. There are a lot of customers who do a lot of “export this SmartList to Excel and then do X” to get data ready. I’ve found many users ..read more