Bulk resize images

Useful WebsitesA 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:

Bulk resize images

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

Useful WebsitesI 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):

Color Hexa website

Remove PowerPoint animations from slides

Microsoft OfficePowerPoint 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:

PowerPoint animations

Disable sounds for all Windows 10 Notifications

WindowsI’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):

Notifications & actions applet

I have an article on the settings shortcuts.

Our Favourite Add-ons from the recent ISC Software Webinar

ISC Software SolutionsIn 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

Microsoft Dynamics GPA 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

ISC Software SolutionsI’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:

Favourite Add-ons Webinar
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

Register Here

Favourite Add-ons Webinar
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

Register Here

Favourite Add-ons Webinar
In November is Prepayments and accruals in Dynamics GP; discover how to improve your processing of prepayments and accruals.

Tue, November 17th, 2020 4:00 PM – 4:45 PM BST

Register Here

Show Workflow Approval Status of posted Microsoft Dynamics GP General Ledger batches

Microsoft Dynamics GPI recently deal with a support call for a client where they were having problems creating a report which showed the approval status of GL batches. Building the WfBusObjKey was more complicated than I expected as it requires the date and time from the batch; for an unposted journal this can easily be retrieved from the Posting Definitions Master Dup (SY00500) table, but for posted batches I had to do some exploring to find where the data was stored.

The table was the Posting Definitions Master History (SY30500); I’ve obviously never written a query which used this table as the name dones;t look familiar, but once I had the tale, it was a simple task to concatenate the fields together to make the WfBusObjKey and pass it to my function which returns the Workflow Approval Status.

I’ve used the SQL query to create a view so that it could easily be hooked into SmartList Builder, Refreshable Excel or other reports::

-- drop view if it exists
IF OBJECT_ID(N'uv_AZRCRV_GeneralLegderBatchApprovalStatus', N'V') IS NOT NULL
	DROP VIEW uv_AZRCRV_GeneralLegderBatchApprovalStatus
GO
-- create view
CREATE VIEW uv_AZRCRV_GeneralLegderBatchApprovalStatus AS
SELECT
	['Year-to-Date Transaction Open'].OPENYEAR AS 'Open Year'
	,['Year-to-Date Transaction Open'].JRNENTRY AS 'Journal Entry'
	,['Year-to-Date Transaction Open'].SEQNUMBR AS 'Sequence Number'
	,dbo.uf_AZRCRV_GetWorkflowApprovalStatus(
												'General Ledger Batch Approval'
												,CAST(RTRIM(['Posting Definitions Master History'].BACHNUMB) AS VARCHAR(15))
													+ '~' + RTRIM(['Posting Definitions Master History'].BCHSOURC) 
													+ '~' + FORMAT(['Posting Definitions Master History'].CREATDDT, 'yyyy/M/d') 
													+ '~' + FORMAT(['Posting Definitions Master History'].TIME1 ,'HH:mm:ss')
											) AS 'Wordflow Approval Status'
FROM
       GL20000 AS ['Year-to-Date Transaction Open'] WITH (NOLOCK)
INNER JOIN
	SY30500 AS ['Posting Definitions Master History'] WITH (NOLOCK)
		ON
			['Posting Definitions Master History'].TRXSORCE = ['Year-to-Date Transaction Open'].TRXSORCE
GO
GRANT SELECT ON uv_AZRCRV_GeneralLegderBatchApprovalStatus TO DYNGRP
GO

What’s New in the Microsoft Dynamics GP October 2020 Release

Microsoft Dynamics GPI’ve been keeping my out for any news of the next version of Microsoft Dynamics GP but haven’t seen anything on the official blogs (if I’ve missed it, I’d appreciate someone pointing me in the direction), but there have been some recent articles from other partners listing some of the upcoming new functionality.

One such article is from Aisling Dynamics Consulting, LLC on the ERP Software Blog.

Since the introduction of the modern lifecycle the official name will remain Microsoft Dynamics GP and the technical name being Microsoft Dynamics GP 18.3, I will be referring to it as the Microsoft Dynamics GP October 2020 Release from here on.

I don’t know if this is the complete list of new functionality for the Microsoft Dynamics GP October 2020 Release, but the new features listed by Aisling are:

  • System

    • Ability to disable the system print dialog box when printing a Word Template
    • Maximizing GP reports on “print to screen” rather than needing to resize the window
  • Financial

    • A New User Defined Field is available in GL Transaction Entry
    • Limiting Excel Copy/Paste decimal places to what is in Currency Setup
    • Reconcile all years in the General Ledger Reconcile utility, instead of one year at a time
  • Purchasing

    • Copy/Paste transactions in Payables transactions (as per GL transaction Entry)
    • Two new user-defined fields on Payables Transaction Entry (adding to the long description on Payables Transactions added in the October 2019 Release)
    • Added the DBA Name Field on the Vendor Card and 1099 form updates
    • The 1099-NEC form! For payables Non-Employee Compensation reporting requirements starting at the end of this year, Microsoft will include the new 1099-NEC form
  • Human resources

    • Ability to mask the Social Security Number on HR reports

Included in this fix, as always, will be a number of bug fixes.

Keep an eye on the Product Lifecycle page to make sure you remain on a supported version of Microsoft Dynamics GP; GP 2010 will be out of extended support as of October 2020, so any site still using this versions should be looking to upgrade as soon as possible.

Microsoft Dynamics GP Workflow Payables Batch Approval email not including Word template

Microsoft Dynamics GPA client has recently been working on a project to implement approval workflows in a few modules of Microsoft Dynamics GP, but had an issue with the Payables Transaction Approvals notification emails not always including the Word template which all of the steps are marked to include.

There appeared to be no pattern on which approval emails either did or did not include the Word template; a user would receive the Word template on to emails, then not on the third, but again receive it on the fourth.

Doing some searching online found a post by Rob Klaproth of Armanino where he had the same issue and confirmed that there is a known issue logged with Microsoft whereby when the user submits a document for approval, and clicks submit on the comment box before the Word template has finished generating the email will not include the Word template.

The workaround for this issue is to make sure that users wait until the Word template has finished processing, as shown by the Template processing message at the bottom of the main Microsoft Dynamics GP window. If they wait until this processing has completed before hitting submit, the Word template will be included on the notification email.

This issue affects all of the edit list Word template attachments through all of the Workflow approval types.