Use reports in daily work

Path: Analytics, business intelligence, and reporting > Use reports in daily work · tier official · system reporting · narrative reviewed (checked by Opus)

Overview

This section covers the everyday tasks around standard reports in Business Central. It has no subtopics, only a set of task pages. The landing page, “Use reports in your daily work”, gives the overall picture: running, scheduling, sharing and customizing reports.

The other pages each take one task. “Run and print reports” covers filters, preview, saving to PDF, Word or Excel, scheduling, and language and format settings. “Manage Saved Settings” and “Set the Layout Used by a Report” cover how a report is configured and how it looks. “Specify a Default Printer” covers printing. “Share and Export Reports with the Report Inbox” covers scheduled output. “Bookmark link to page or report” covers quick access from the role center. “Analyzing report data with Excel and XML” covers raw data export for troubleshooting.

Start with the landing page, then go to “Run and print reports” for the basic workflow. Move on to the other pages when you need to set defaults, change layouts or share results.

Key points

• Reports can be run, previewed, printed and scheduled, and saved to PDF, Word or Excel, with filter options and language and format settings.
• Saved settings for reports and batch jobs can be created, changed and shared with other users to set default options and filters.
• Report layouts can be set as the default per company, chosen temporarily on the report request page, or managed on the Report Layouts and Report Layout Selection pages.
• Layout options include composite branding, theme assignment and header/footer layouts.
• Default printers can be set for all print jobs or for specific reports, at user or global level, including cloud printers, Universal Print, email printers and PDF output.
• The Report Inbox lets users download, share, export and delete scheduled reports, with OneDrive integration.
• Pages and reports can be bookmarked from the role center using the bookmark icon or the Tell Me window.
• Report datasets can be exported as data-only Excel documents or XML, with a metadata worksheet and filter information, for ad-hoc analysis and troubleshooting.

Learn pages

• Analyzing report data with Excel and XML: Learn how to use Excel and XML to analyze a report dataset.
• Bookmark link to page or report on role center: Using the bookmark icon, you can add an action that opens a page or report from the navigation menu of your role center.
• Manage Saved Settings for Reports and Batch Jobs: Describes hwo the admin can set up predefined options and filters for a report and share those settings with one or all users.
• Run and print reports in Business Central: Learn how to add a report to the job queue and schedule it to run on a specific date and time.
• Set the Layout Used by a Report in Business Central: Learn how to select the default report layout for each company, temporarily use another layout, and distinguish layout selection from reusable branding.
• Share and Export Reports with the Report Inbox: Learn how to use the Report Inbox page to download, share, export, and delete reports in Business Central.
• Specify a Default Printer: Learn about the different ways to set up printers to be used by default for print jobs.
• Use reports in your daily work: Provides an overview of the reporting features in Business Central.

Videos and posts

Linked by a Haiku matcher with a grounding quote from the item’s summary (link/topics.ts); machine-generated.

• What’s Cooking in Business Central: Excel Reports that Become Generally Available (video): “Report Customization in Excel; Slicer Controls for Report Filtering”

Business Central pages and reports

The pages, reports and queries this hub’s Learn pages name (ms.search.form, API reference), joined to the code by exact object id (data/index/docs-objects.json); a page shows the table it runs on.

• Page 680 “Report Inbox” · on Table 477 “Report Inbox”
• Page 2650 “Email Printer Settings” · on Table 2650 “Email Printer Settings”
• Page 2750 “Universal Printer Settings” · on Table 2751 “Universal Printer Settings”
• Page 2752 “Add Universal Printers Wizard” · captioned “Add Universal Print Printers”
• Page 2753 “Universal Print Shares List” · captioned “Print Shares” · on Table 2752 “Universal Print Share Buffer”
• Page 2754 “Universal Printer Tray List” · captioned “Universal Printer Trays” · on Table 823 “Name/Value Buffer”
• Page 8900 “Administrator Main Role Center” · captioned “Administrator Role Center”
• Page 9650 “Custom Report Layouts” · on Table 9650 “Custom Report Layout”
• Page 9652 “Report Layout Selection” · on Table 9651 “Report Layout Selection”

Source: Microsoft Learn (CC BY 4.0). Descriptions are Learn’s own.