Author: Ian Grieve

Ian is a Microsoft Dynamics GP certified consultant specialising in the delivery of Microsoft Dynamics GP projects and currently the Lead ERP Consultant for ISC Software Ltd., a Microsoft Partner, VAR and ISV in England. Ian has worked with Microsoft Dynamics GP since 2003 and, over the nine years since, has dealt with all aspects of the product life-cycle from presales, to implementation, to technical and functional training, to post go-live support and subsequent upgrades and process reviews. In his spare time, Ian runs the azurecurve | Ramblings of a Dynamics GP Consultant blog dedicated to Microsoft Dynamics GP and related products.

Microsoft Dynamics GP Fall 2020 Release is now available

Monday 12th Oct 2020 Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

Towards the end of last week, on the Dynamics GP Support and Services Blog announced the release of the Microsoft Dynamics GP Fall 2020 Release.

You can download the full product lock or service pack lock depending on how you plan to install/upgrade Dynamics GP.

If you’re doing an upgrade, there is also an upgrade blog series which runs through the important issues to consider when doing an upgrade.

Microsoft have done this release differently to previous releases, as the new feature blog series has only just started, whereas it was previously published in advance of the product release.

I will do my usual series of blog posts over the coming weeks on installing the new version as well as running through all of the new features.

PowerShell Snippets: Output list of folders and sub-folders

Monday 5th Oct 2020Saturday 19th Sep 2020 Ian Grieve1 minute read0 comment

This post is part of the series on PowerShell Snippets.

The following PowerShell command will export a list of folders and sub-folders from the specified location (the first highlighted section is the starting folder and the second the output path for the CS file):

Get-ChildItem -Path \\nas3\public\movies -Recurse -Directory -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-Object FullName | Export-CSV c:\temp\export.txt

Click to show/hide the PowerShell Snippets Series Index

PowerShell Snippets
Write-Output
Start-Sleep
PowerShell to run script bypassing execution policy
Unlock BitLocker protected drive with PowerShell
Run escalated PowerShell script from a batch file
Output list of folders and sub-folders
Delete File
Run Application (Such as 7-zip)
Format Json for Curl
Use Curl
Use Curl
Use Curl
Use Curl
Get One Value from GitHub Json
Get Numeric Value from String
Prompt for User Input
Prompt User for Password
Prompt for Multiple Inputs
Prompt for Multiple Inputs

Bulk watermark images

Thursday 1st Oct 2020Thursday 1st Oct 2020 Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

A couple of days ago, I posted about a website which allowed you to bulk resize images; that site has a sister site which allows images to be watermarked in bulk.

The Batch Watermark; you are able to use an image or text as the watermark and it will be applied to all of the uploaded photos:

I am not a huge fan of watermarking images, but lots of people will use any photo posted online as if it was copyright free, so when I upload photos to my Coppr|Distilleries to Visit and Dark Forge | Tourist Attractions sites, I will apply a watermark to them so any other use of the photo will at least include the original source.

Bulk resize images

Tuesday 29th Sep 2020Thursday 1st Oct 2020 Ian Grieve1 minute read0 comment

A few months ago I posted about the Tiny JPG site which can be used to shrink files for posting online; this site redcues the filesize of the image, but not the dimensions of the image.

I am building two sites at the moment (Coppr|Distilleries to Visit and Dark Forge | Tourist Attractions), onto which I will be uploading photographs of the places I have visited. Before uploading the photos, I need to resize the photos dimensions and to do this I need an application or at least I thought I needed an application, but I then found Bulk Resize Photos:

This site allows you to resize up to 150 photos at a time and you have control over how it resizes (based on height, width or longest side) while keeping the filesize below a certain size. Early experimentation suggests that this site does exactly what I need and does so without needing to install anything, meaning I can use it from any computer.

Generate matching colour palettes

Friday 25th Sep 2020Friday 25th Sep 2020 Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

I run a few websites now which means I have had a need to change colours on themes. However, being colourblind, this can be somewhat difficult to mke sure that the colours I am choosing will work together. One site I have found very useful is ColorHexa.com; this is a free color tool providing information about any color and generating matching color palettes for your designs (such as complementary, analogous, triadic, tetradic or monochromatic colors schemes).

The below screenshot shows part of the color palette generated for this sites main colour azure blue (#007FFF):

Remove PowerPoint animations from slides

Wednesday 23rd Sep 2020Thursday 24th Sep 2020 Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

PowerPoint is not something I have used very often, but I am now doing webinars on at least a monthly basis at work. I’ve inherited some PowerPoint slidedecks from other people with some features I don’t like; one of those is having to click to display elements on slides. This is something which I now know to be animations and their removal is actually quite straightforward.

To remove an animation, select the Animations tab and then select element with animations; the Animation section of the action pane will show the type of animation currently selected; click None to remove the animation:

Disable sounds for all Windows 10 Notifications

Monday 21st Sep 2020Saturday 19th Sep 2020 Ian Grieve2 minute read0 comment

I’ve been switching off sounds for notifications for different programs for a while as I find the notuification chime far too loud compared to other program sounds, but as I am doing this on five or more machines, it is getting somewhat irritating. I eventually started thinking about a global switch off and wanted to see if this was possible, but since Microsoft moved settings out of the Control Panel, I have had a hard time finding a setting when I want it.

This particular setting does exist and is in what is an obvious place (or at least obvious when you know where it is); do disable sounds on notifications globally, open the Notifications and settings app (the shortcut ms-settings:notifications can be used to open it quickly) and unmark the Allow notifications to play sounds):

I have an article on the settings shortcuts.

Our Favourite Add-ons from the recent ISC Software Webinar

Friday 18th Sep 2020Friday 18th Sep 2020 Ian Grieve4 minute read0 comment

In our most recent webinar, on Our Favourite Add-ons, we took a look at six of the add-ons which are preferred solutions from our senior consultants. They all meet a requirement which numerous clients have given to us at different times. Usually, there are several plugins which offer similar functionality which would meet these requirements, but these six add-ons are the ones which we recommend time after time. If you want to catch up on, or any other, webinar, you can do so here.

Before I give a brief overview of each of the add-ons, a quick introduction. Microsoft Dynamics GP is a full-featured ERP system with many modules, but one of the original founding design decisions was to support the enhancement by way of third party add-on modules, which closely integrate into the software and in many cases are indistinguishable from the core module. These add-ons are available from many, many vendors around the world (although many of them are located near the birth-place of the software in Fargo, North Dakota).

Each consultant will usually have a list of go-to add-ons which they’ve recommended to a number of clients, and this list is derived from these lists from each of the consultants (there was a lot of overlap between us). This is not to say that there are not other great, competing, add-ons; there are but we had to limit the list to six in order to cover them in a thirty minute webinar.

SmartList Builder

Smartist Builder is the add-on with which I have the most and longest experience. Created by eOne Solutions, it allows for the creation of new SmartList objects to meet needs not covered by the out-of-the-box SmartList objects; this often covers reports such as vendors with email and EFT details or Payables Distributions. It also supports the creation of SmartList objects using SQL views such as Budgets By Month or Sales By Customer By Fiscal Year.

While you can also do this using the SmartList Designer, which comes as a standard part of Microsoft Dynamics GP, SmartList Builder is much more flexible and easy to use and has a lot more functionality; I have a blog from May 2019 covering the differnces between SmartList Builder and SmartList Designer.

I have previously blogged about implementing SmartList Builder.

Continue reading “Our Favourite Add-ons from the recent ISC Software Webinar”

Error opening Word templates from Microsoft Dynamics GP Workflow Action emails

Wednesday 16th Sep 2020Wednesday 16th Sep 2020 Ian Grieve4 minute read4 Comments

A client reported a problem with workflow approvers opening the batch edit list on a Microsoft Dynamics GP General Ledger Batch Approval workflow action email this morning; only a few users are having problems while everyone else is working without problem. The users with the problem are getting this error when trying to open the Transaction Edit List report on the email:

Word experienced an error trying to open the file...

Microsoft Word
Word experienced an error trying to open the file.
Try these suggestions.
* Check the file permissions for the document or drive.
* Make sure there is sufficient free memory and disk space.
* Open the file with the Text recovery converter.
(C:...transaction Edit List.docx)

I did some research and found there was a recent post on the Dynamics GP Support and Services Blog where they covered this same issue. The blog post was only four days ago and they acknowledge the issue is ongoing and offer the workaround of downgrading Microsoft Office to work around the issue (I did this recently when sending emails using MAPI caused Dynamics GP to crash).

The problem does not just affect the Word template reports from Workflow Batch Approval emails, but also the Word templates used for sending purchase or sales orders, remittances and so on. For the non workflow Word templates, you could reconfigure the templates to use PDF, or one of the other formats, instead of Word, but, unfortunately, this option is not available for the batch edit lists.

Following the initial report, we’ve had a number of other clients report the issue, so it may be worth preempting problems and block Office updates for Dynamics GP users until a fix is in place from Microsoft.

Upcoming Microsoft Dynamics GP Webinars from ISC Software

Friday 11th Sep 2020Friday 11th Sep 2020 Ian Grieve3 minute read0 comment

I’ve been quite busy both in and out of work recently and have lagged in the writing of blog posts, so I thought I’d let you know of the three upcoming monthly webinars I’ll be delivering for ISC Software.

We run these webinars on a monthly basis, with occasional extra webinars added to the schedule so it is worth checking the Webinar Schedule page every so often.

The upcoming webinars are:

Next week is Our Favourite Dynamics GP Add-ons; discover our favourite add-ons to extend the functionality of Dynamics GP.

Tue, Sept 15th, 2020 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM BST

In October is Budgets in Microsoft Dynamics GP; learn how to manage your budgets in Microsoft Dynamics GP (covers budget creation, maintenance and reporting on budgets).

Tue, October 20th, 2020 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM BST