Do you hate it, too?

You’re working in a grid with many columns, you scroll to the right to find the column you want to filter. You enter the filter, hit return and the grid jumps back to the first column?

Here is why: The focus is still on the first column. After applying the filter, this column is therefore brought back into your view.

This also leads to the solution: Before filtering, click into the field of interest (maybe the column you want to filter). Now, the grid won’t jump any more to a position you don’t care about.

If you work in a system for some time you learn tricks that make it easier to use that system. Usually, you don’t even realize that you use them until you watch a new user and ask „But why don’t you …“.

So I thought I’d start a collection of some of those tiny tricks I use in AX very often. I will add to the list as I go along in my projects and notice something that might help new users.

Sort Descending in Context Menu

Day in date control

Calculator in number control

Navigate with Tab, Down Cursor or Ctrl-PgDown

Stop the jumping grid

If you navigate within a form and use the tab key, you will realize that the current value in the control is preselected. You can then directly type in the value you want to enter because the old value is automatically overwritten.

In some cases, I navigate with the mouse to „my“ control, tab out of it to the next control and tab back (hold shift), just so that I don’t have to select the text with my mouse. Weiterlesen →

You can use any editable number control in AX as a calculator.

Say you’re just receiving stock, and it’s 3 packages with 95 items each, but 17 are already missing …

Try it out. You might find it useful from time to time.

In date controls, just enter the day and it will automatically expand to that day in the current month:

If you want today’s date, but don’t remember that it’s the thirteenth, just type d, and it’ll expand.

I often see people clicking twice on a column’s header because they want the list to be sorted in descending ordet. Clicking twice is fine if sorting doesn’t take longer than you like. If it does: Open the context menu on the column (not the Header, but in a value field).