New “Display in Grid View” Feature in Management Reporter CU13
Management Reporter 2012 CU13 was released today. You can read all about it on the MSDN blog, but there are a couple of items worth mentioning here.
- You can no longer create a new connection to Dynamics SL via the legacy adapter. Apparently it is still upgradable if you have it in place, but unless you have a really good reason for avoiding the data mart, it is time to let the legacy adapter go. Especially if your reasons predate CU10 or so.
- CU13 is the last update to support Dynamics GP 2010.
- There is no more support for SQL Server 2005
There’s more. Read the blog post before performing the upgrade!
Display Reports in a Grid View
One feature caught my eye that I wanted to check out, so I’ll share my findings with you.
Figure 1
In Figure 1 above, a new option labeled “Display reports in grid view” is available and unchecked by default. After checking it and generating the report, I got exactly what I asked for! A report displayed in a grid:
Figure 2 – grid view on
Just for comparison, here is what it looks like without the new option checked:
Figure 3 – Grid View turned off
The pure formatting features of the report are removed in the grid view. I can see this as a useful tool to quickly generate some data without having to do any formatting other than the line skips.
Next, I wanted to check and see if this helps all the MR users that immediately export their reports to Excel.
First, I copied and pasted the assets section of this balance sheet rendered both ways to see if it made any difference. There is not enough difference to influence how to choose either way:
Figure 4
Finally, I did an export to Excel using the Download button in the web viewer:
Figure 5
Again, there is essentially no difference in the output:
Figure 6
While it is an interesting new feature, the final verdict is to call this a visual choice that will help make quick work of rendering a report without the need for a lot of formatting cues.