Business Central and MS Excel

The most financial users in a company are very keen in MS Excel. I have seen the most impresive worksheet. And it is a very good thing to combine your Business Central with MS Excel.

In Business Central 2021 wave 2 there are also some improvements made by Microsoft. In the version before Business Central 2021 wave 2 we now that you have the options “Edit in Excel” and “Open in Excel”

In Business Central 2021 wave 2 there is a new share icon introduces. Here you can also the “Edit in Excel” and “Open in Excel”.

You see this share icon in list pages. But now also on the fasttab Lines:

But there is more 😊. Before Business Central 2021 wave 2 the handling of Editing and exporting in Excel was done by the platform. But in Business Central 2021 wave 2 Microsoft have bring it to the system app:

So when you look into codeunit “EditInExcel.Codeunit.al” there are three functions you can use:

• EditPageInExcel(PageCaption: Text[240]; PageId: Text; Filter: Text)
• EditPageInExcel(PageCaption: Text[240]; PageId: Text; Filter: Text; FileName: Text)
• GenerateExcelWorkBook(TenantWebService: Record “Tenant Web Service”; SearchFilter: Text)

With these functions you can create an “Edit in Excel” for each page you want. In the backend it will create a webservices for you (function FindOrCreateWorksheetWebService in codeunit 1482 “Edit in Excel Impl.”).

So if there is no “Edit in Excel” option you can create one of your one 😊.

And the last improvement is also that you can deploy de MS Excel add-in in Business Central. “Excel Add-in Centralized Deployment”

So step by step it is getting better and better 😊.