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Invoice word file for Purchasing

in this video we're gonna be taking a look at how we can change document layouts using Microsoft Word and Business Central so this can be done for customer-facing documents or supplier facing documents such as invoices purchase orders and so on so we're going to spend a bit of time looking at how we do that so first what we need to do is go into custom report layouts which is going to take us to an area of the system where we can start thinking about what type of layout it is that we want to change so there's a couple that we have in in this list already the one that we're going to focus on today is the cells invoice but as you can see you've also got purchase order we've also got draft invoices pro forma invoices which are free to change as well so just looking at a couple of the options we have for invoices so the default I believe is this cells invoice blue simple so if we wanted to preview what that looks like we can go into process run report and we can choose a previous invoice to run this report with so just having a look here let's just pick one of our random orders from the system and preview that so this is going to give us an impression of what that report looks like as standard so a little bit of time to spit that out but we can see we've got our company name at the top right all of the relevant information and a nice layout with a blue table there to say show you another example let's do this red cells invoice and so let's do the same thing so run report preview just so that we can see the way that it differs and the point of this is so that we can start having a look at sort of different starting points for invoice layouts just so that we're not having to start from scratch but we are going to use this invoice cells invoice at blue simple in this particular example now what we can't do is change a built-in report within the system what we first need to do is copy that report and name it something different so let's do example invoice we'll just rename that example invoice and what we can then do is export this layer out using export layout and it will dump it into word for us so if we open this in word we'll see that we've got something that looks slightly different to what we saw when we previewed it in business central because what we're now seeing is the field names in the background that the document is pulling through before it's being generated because of course business central needs to know from that document what data it's calling through so we're just going to enable editing here I'm gonna save this to my desktop so let's just do save as example report or example invoice so we'll save that there just so that it's saved with the name that I recognized instead of just download or sales invoice or whatever it happens to be when it spat out the system there's a couple of other things that we need to bear in mind before we start making changes to this document so the first is if we do want to add in any more fields that may not already be included within the document we need to enable developer tools within Microsoft Word now without going into the technical detail this is where we need to start using sort of the xml mappings so the business central knows what fields to pull through to the document so what we're going to do is we're going to go into file we're going to click on options within word we're then going to go to customize ribbon and we're going to turn on this Developer tab here so we just going to put tick in the box and click on OK that means that we've now got a Developer tab that we can click on the XML mapping pain for I'm just gonna get rid of the navigation here and we'll be able to see that if we click on you RN Microsoft Dynamics report standard these are all the table and field headings that we could bring into our report ok so before we start bringing in additional fields what I'm going to do is I'm just going to change some of the formatting here so let's go into our table table design and we'll change the layout so let's just go in and make that purple for example so we'll do that instead it's also make our text purple so it fits the theme so let's just go in and choose that sort of dark color there and I'm going to do the same for my field headings there too just so that we do have an element of consistency let's just highlight all of them there we go core and then there we go so to be fair we don't really need to do anything more than that if it's just stylistic changes that we're wanting to make in terms of color so it fits fits closer to arbor and anything in the in the footer again we need to double click to get into that detail before we can then make those changes so I'll just do that again quickly there we go so high level stylistic changes easy enough to do just using word now let's imagine that we've got another field that we want to bring in so within ourselves invoices as well as the document date the due date and any payment terms we also want to add in shipping information so maybe a shipping code or shipping agent or whatever your terminology is what I'm first going to do is I'm just going to expose the borders on this table here just so that I can see what's going on with my layouts because I'm going to add in another column here so let's just insert to the right and then what we need to do is find the shipping information from our available fields in our xml mappings so let's go into shipping method description or shipping agent code again it depends what field you want to pull through but let's first pull through the heading so you'll see that the heading all the field names are always appended with this underscore label at the end which means it's a heading not actual data so let's go into insert as plain text and I'm just going to copy the formatting of this other heading that we've got there so format there and then to actually bring in the data what we need to then do is actually pull in the shipping method description here into the report too so that's once again insert content control plain text to bring that description and so we've now got the field name and then the field description as per however we've entered that data in business central so I'm now going to get rid of the borders just because I don't need those anymore so let's just go borders no borders just so that it looks a little bit prettier and then what we're going to do now is import this layout back into business central so I'm going to save that as my example invoice we go back into business central and under our example invoice here I'm going to click on layout import layout should be in my downloads list so let's just go in to downloads here example invoice ok ok so you should have uploaded in the background for us to preview again we can go into process run reports and then select the same invoice number so let's preview that now so we should have nice powerful document instead and then we've got shipment method coming through but I've got nothing specified for this shipment method within this particular template but it would pull through the data there underneath had this been populated with data so just an easy example of the ways that you can pull in data from other fields in Business Central even if they're not included in the standard report they're so easy enough to do there are of course a number of other fields that you have access to so just to take you through a couple of common ones that we see coming through into cells invoices for example it may be that you want to add in which salesperson is actually generated that invoice that's that's quite common one we've also got some other ones here so meeting up a little bit shipping date or shipping date or let's have a look shipment date yeah that's quite a common one just so that the customer knows what what date that we shipped it and a couple of others as well so again you'll build up a better feel for of what you need to bring into your document now it's but it's not too complicated and you don't really need much of a technical mind to start bringing data into your report straight away to order dynamics 365 licenses or to sign up to a 30-day free trial navigate to d3 65.9 forward slash now [Music]