The Power Platform is our new and improved destination for admin level customization of CRM systems. This article is going to briefly run over what the Power Platforms interface looks like – using the creation of a “View” as an example.
Going to https://powerapps.microsoft.com/allows us to view any PowerApps, CDS Data in your system, Flows (Power Automate), the new AI builder and your system’s solutions. We finally have a collection of tools in one place that go above and beyond what is offered by Dynamics 365. Building out forms, views, dashboards and business rules is all done through the “Data” section and it couldn’t be easier.
Under data – we can navigate to our entities to build an entity specific view!
Remember that stale old vertical list of entity properties? Looked a little something like this:
Well you can kiss that list goodbye in an undetermined amount of time as we have a new look for our customization navigation. The new navigation allows for a much more responsive experience. Microsoft has added filtering on the individual columns in the view as well as a search bar so you can quickly find a specific field, Relationship, Business Rule… Etc:
Clicking into our “Account” entity brings up some familiar customization options. I’ll be navigating to Views to check out the new view interface.
And here we go… For those of you who have customized views before you’ll immediately notice my favourite boon – We get live data when adjusting the view! No more pesky Results button to see our filtered content. This allows us to make sure we are pulling in the correct data the first time without having to go through the save and publish process for some trial and error testing. Adding a column is done through the self-explanatory “Add Column” button.
Here you can filter and finally search your desired field for the view. No longer will we be reciting the alphabet in our head as we scroll a seemingly infinite list of alphabetically sorted fields. Another handy benefit of warming up to the new customization interface.
Selecting the drop down on a field in the view brings up our field properties such as increasing and decreasing width or moving columns into the correct order. We are now able to input a specific pixel count (max 300) for our columns – straying away from the columns that are incremented by 50 pixels.
On the right side of the screen we have our view name, sort section and custom filters. Filters of course allowing us to narrow down our data to pinpoint exactly what we want.
Here I’ve built a filter to sort where Account Name contains “City”
And with a save and publish our view will now be available in CRM! I hope you find the new customization interfaces as intuitive as I have in my time exploring the features. It’s a great combination of familiar options with new features (we can search for fields, workflows… anything!). Although we still have the old customization interface available – I would recommend playing around with these high quality updates that Microsoft has implemented with the Power Platform.
