Make custom views with filters and columns in your Dynamics 365 Sales lists
There’s so much data in your CRM system, and without a clear organizational structure to help you sift through it all, you will struggle to find the tree amongst the forest. Dynamics 365 Sales comes with pre-built lists for each entity (Contacts, Accounts, Leads, Opportunities…) to suit a host of needs.
For instance, in the Lead list, you have “All Leads,” “Open Leads,” “MY Open Leads,” and “Closed Leads,” each of which are built from filters to pull only those types of leads into the list, which is designed with columns that Microsoft anticipates an average Salesperson will need. This is a standard expectation of most interfaces, whether it be a pet store’s e-commerce site that lets you filter by pet type, product category, and search for specific items or a banking app that lets you filter your account activity by time period.
But while most applications or websites come with their own pre-built filters or views you can choose from, those filters are limited to a few distinct options that the organization has selected, and what data appears in each column in a view is usually nonnegotiable. In other words, it’s just not flexible.
This is not the case in Dynamics 365 Sales, where you have the pre-built options available to you with the ability to customize what filters you use and what columns you see in the lists. This is one example (and some of our favorite parts) of the extreme customizability of the Dynamics 365 Sales interface. You can build your own views with only the data you want to see. Then you can save those views to use later, share them with your team, work with that data, and even export it.
A note about your data
We want to emphasize before we begin that altering these lists using custom filters and column selections is not altering anything about the actual data in your system—you’re simply creating new ways that the system identifies data to pull for you to see. You can’t “break” or delete anything, so experimentation is welcome!
At the same time, these views are yours alone (unless you share them, which we will cover later). So, you can get really into the weeds to create views with your very specific requirements.
Tour a list
You will create a new view from a list page, like Accounts, and use the View selector, the Edit columns button, and the Edit filters buttons to manipulate what data you see in the list page, which is filled with lines of data.
Our first tip is to use a view that is as close to what you’re looking for as you can get, and then adjust as necessary. This way you won’t have to start from scratch.
The view’s name is in the top left of the screen. In our example image below, the view is “Active Accounts,” and the columns include the account name, phone number, city, the primary contact and their email address. The only filter applied to this view is Status equals Active to ensure no deactivated or old accounts show up here.
To select a new view, you can click the drop-down carrot directly after the view name, and a list will appear.
Example Scenario
Every view is built to serve a need, whether that is to complete a single project or help facilitate your regular job tasks.
Let’s set up the following scenario: imagine that we want to send a card or gift to our clients at the start of the new year to show our appreciation for their patronage throughout the previous year. To do this, we want to identify our active clients who bought from us last year, and we want to send that gift or card to a person at the company who works directly with us. So, we will create a view to provide us that info, which we will use to print shipping labels.
Edit columns
When you are creating a new view or editing an existing view, you can choose what columns of data appear. This data will pull from the record itself (in this case, the account record) or entities related to the record (like the mailing address for that account’s primary contact – the name of the primary contact is stored in the account record as a lookup field, but their other information is stored on that contact’s record).
To edit the columns, click the “Edit columns” button near the top right of the view. A side panel will open, where you can move columns up or down the list, which will translate to right and left in the list itself. You can also delete columns if they are not needed for the list you’re creating (and again, remember that deleting columns or filters from a view does not actually remove any data from the system). And finally, you can add columns from the record or related records – there are a lot of fields to choose from, especially if you are searching for a field in a related record.
For our example, we have selected the account name, the primary contact of that account, and we also want to pull in that contact’s mailing address. All of this will help us in our ultimate goal of sending them a gift or card as a thank you for their business last year.
When you’ve finished adding, removing, and moving columns, you can click “Apply” in this side panel and you’ll see your changes in the list!
Create filters
After you’ve adjusted the columns of data you want the list to include, your next step is to alter the accounts that are actually being pulled into the list. To do so, click “Edit filters” at the top of the list. Another side panel will appear. Each line is a different part of the query that dictates which accounts, from all the available accounts in the system, will show in this list.
From here you can add filters to whittle the list down to exactly what you want. You can add new filter conditions, groups of conditions, and even conditions for related entities (like when we edited columns) to filter not just on data in that record itself, but records it is connected to.
The first box in a condition will identify the column/field you’re filtering on. The second box is the filter operator that acts as the center of this equation we’re making—the operator choices will change according to the field you’ve selected. And the third box is the value, or the actual result you do or do not want to see.
Recall our example scenario—sending a gift to our customers who bought from us last year. To find those clients, we included three filter conditions: the status of the account must be active, the account must have ordered something from us in the last 1 year, and the account has to have a primary contact (that field cannot be blank, or else who will we send the gift to?).
After you have set your filters, click Apply and see the fruits of your labor! Now you will only see the columns you set – so the account name, the primary contact, and their mailing address – for the active accounts that have ordered from you in the last year. This is the perfect list for our needs, and we can proceed with our task of sending those thank-you gifts.
Save a custom view
When we customize a view, an asterisk will appear after its name to denote that what you’re seeing on the page is not the original view, but an altered version. At this point, if you navigate away from this view, all your filters and column changes will be lost. So, if you want to use this view more than just this one time, you want to save the view.
Open the view selector and click “Save as new view.” A window will pop open prompting you to give the new view a name and an optional description. Give the new view a clear name, and use the description to identify the columns, filters, and purpose of the view if you want (especially if you’re going to share the view). Doing this will help you keep your view selector clean and remove any unused/unneeded views in the future. We’re going to label ours “New Years Labels.”
After you save the view, it will appear in your view selector with a human icon next to it – this indicates that it is a personal view, as opposed to a system view.
Changing the default view and sharing views with coworkers
From the View selector, you also can see which view is the Default one that appears first when opening the list—like a home page on a browser. Perhaps you create a new view that works better for your daily tasks and you just want to cut that step of changing views when you first open this list. You can do just that by clicking “Set as default view” at the bottom of the View selector.
And directly below that option, you can also “Manage and share views,” which opens a side panel with a handful of very useful functions.
At the top of this panel, you can sort the view selector in a few ways: all personal view before system views, all system views before personal views, or view types mixed together and alphabetized.
Clicking the three dots next to a view’s name, you have a variety of options for each view, some of which include:
Hide or show in the view selector – It can be helpful to hide views if you have a lot of views available to you but you don’t use most of them.
Delete a view
Edit a view
Set the view as default
Share the view
Etc.
When sharing a view, you will select a user or a team to share with, and then you will manage their permissions for this view and determine if they have the ability to just see the view, or if they can do other things like edit the columns and filters in the view, share it with yet more of your team, etc.
Using Focused view for an easy workflow
Now, you can also utilize Focused view in tandem with custom views to maximize your workflow. Focused view essentially condenses your record list and record form page into a single view in your window. On the left is your record list—and you can change between list views—and on the right is the actual record that you have selected from that list.
The real treat here is that if you create a custom view to help you achieve a certain task, using Focused view helps you run through those records really quickly, no jumping back and forth from the record to the list again and again. If you’re checking in on your leads, for instance, you can use a filter like “My open leads,” then just click through the list to see each of their status’, reach out to them, and so forth.
Opening and using focused view
Creating custom views with hand-picked columns and filters is an excellent, low-effort way to adjust the way you consume and understand your lists in Dynamics 365. They are easy to create, save, share, and then sort and search! Plus, we can use other features in the app, like Focused view, with these custom list settings to make the interface more optimized for data entry and other tasks.
How useful this functionality is cannot be overstated, so go try it out and see what benefits it can bring to your workflows!