One of the most appreciated capabilities by users of Business Central, with permissions for it, is the option to manage Business Central list information through Excel sheets. From very old versions of NAVISION, where copy + paste from lists was the day-to-day administration, to recent versions of BC where there are advanced capabilities for integrating lists with Excel through the creation of OData Web Services or Excel sharing, Excel Report Layouts, etc. Excel has always been present and accompanying the evolution of BC from its beginning to our days.
But I suspect that, from the 2023 version, I'm going to have to set Microsoft Excel aside a bit. At least, regarding the tasks of managing information from Business Central lists. And it's that Microsoft integrates into BC version 22, with public preview from April 2023, the ability to analyze data directly on list-type pages. This raises the level of what we will be able to accomplish within BC without needing to switch applications. I think this is fantastic!
And what's more… they can be saved on a page view as a filter.

How to start with analysis mode?
The feature is in public preview version, which means your administrator must enable it before you can test it. If you decide it's not for you..., the administrator can disable it again. To test it, go to the Functions Administration page and enable analysis mode

Feature Details
These are the details of the feature that it promises and are provided by Microsoft at learn.microsoft.com
The analysis mode is a new way to interact with data on list pages. Instead of running reports with different options and filters, you can simply add multiple tabs that represent different tasks or data views. Examples could be "My customers", "Items to track", "Recently added vendors", "Sales statistics" or any other view you want.
When you're ready to analyze data on a list page (where you might have filtered data using a view or filter pane), simply switch to analysis mode:

Analysis mode opens the data in a new experience that is optimized for data analysis. When a page is in analysis mode, it is divided into two areas:
- The main data area (including a tabs panel)
- The field modifier area

Use the data area to interact with the data. For summable columns, you can easily get descriptive statistics on a set of fields by selecting them.

The bottom of the data area shows the total row count in the column.

Use the field modification area to control the data that will be displayed and its format. In the menu, choose the fields to show or hide.

You can group data by dragging fields to the Grouping section of the Columns menu. This allows you to explore data grouped by one or more fields to the left of the data area.

Grouping works very well in pivot mode. To enable pivot mode, toggle the Pivot Mode switch and then drag the fields to be summed to the Values section.

In pivot mode, you can define groups that are displayed in the column section of the data area. Do this by dragging fields to the Column Labels section of the Columns menu.

Column grouping works best if the grouping field contains only a few values.

Use the Additional Filters menu in the field modifiers area to apply more filters to the dataset. In this part of an analysis, you may want to focus on a specific customer or time period.

The data area gives you extensive control over column layout.

• Drag columns where they make the most sense in your analysis.

• Pin a column to the left or right side of the column section.

• Define data filters directly in the column definition instead of going to the field modifiers area. You can still take a look at details on related data and for each line and open the card for more information about a specific entity.

Business Central can save multiple column configurations and filters. The next time you switch to analysis mode, you can dive directly into data analysis. In the Tabs panel, you can rename or delete a tab.

The Tabs panel also allows you to add new tabs.

Using tabs allows you to save different configurations that you frequently use to analyze a dataset. For example, you can have tabs to analyze data in dynamic mode and other tabs that filter to a subset of rows. Some tabs may show a detailed view with many columns and others only show a few key columns.

In short, a significant improvement in this version. Of course, it will have its limitations regarding data loading and performance with large volumes, as Microsoft indicates, there is currently a limitation on the amount of data to handle – 100,000 rows – so tools like Power BI and others that enable data analysis will continue to add value to business decision-making. We'll see how it evolves.

Thanks for reading us and until the next post!