What’s the “New Look” in Dynamics 365 CRM?

As part of the 2024 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 CRM has been updated with a new modern look and feel. Early access to the New Look was rolled out in February 2024, with general availability in April 2024.

Check out the rest of the 2024 Release Wave 1 plan →

The New Look brings upon visual changes to make Dynamics 365 sleeker, more modern, and more intuitive to use. Here’s a breakdown of the subtle yet impactful changes you can expect to see:

To start, here’s a comparitive look at the “old” view as well as the new look:

The “old” interface of Dynamics 365 CRM. Image courtesy of Microsoft.

Dynamics 365 CRM with the New Look enabled. Image courtesy of Microsoft.

Prominently, the new look will offer a floating command bar at the top of the screen, creating a bigger divide with increased gray space to put greater emphasis on the main content of the page that you’re working in. The visual separation between tables, grids, and screen elements also improve the application interface to make it easier to see all the different features and information available to you on any given page.

You’ll also notice that the corners of each section and button are more rounded, buttons and clickable elements look raised on the screen, and the shadows between elements are dropped, helping them stand out more from section to section. The entire screen’s background color is also brighter, improving the contrast and making the main panels, grids, and tables much more apparent against the rest of the screen.

These improvements are also extended to the headers, tabs, and sections of the main table for easier navigation between sections on the screen.

The new look will also use fluent controls, a UX framework that promotes more a consistent design and feel to page elements like forms, fields, process flows, and page dialogues, making them feel more responsive. Users will notice that the new look offers an infinite scroll within tables and grids, giving the application a more modern and consistent interface with enhanced usability.

One thing to note, though, is that the new look doesn’t currently support dark mode, nor does it support custom color themes in the menu bar. In the new look, all applications default to a dark navy color, but system admins can override the header colors if needed.

Enabling New Look

For end users to enable the new look, you’ll simply be able to use the New Look toggle in the very top right corner of the screen.

Before you can toggle the look on and off, it must first be enabled by a system admin, but individual users can decide to toggle the new look on (or off) and can switch back and forth between the two looks as many times as you’d like throughout the day.

Admins can enable or disable the new look toggle for users on a per-app basis through the Power Apps designer. With an app open in the designer, admin users can open the Settings button at the top to flip the toggle in the Features list.

When Microsoft rolls out new features, improvements, and bug fixes for the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform apps, you can always check them out ahead of time using the Release Planner tool. Check out the Release Planner tool to stay on top of all the latest Microsoft releases!