Grid Enhancements for Dynamics 365 and Model-Driven Apps

In Dynamics 365 and model-driven apps, you can now easily reorder columns using drag-and-drop controls on column header.

This is just one example of a series of new grid features introduced in the 2024 Release Wave 2 to improve user navigation and help you act on your data.

Another approach is to use the new ‘move left’ and ‘move right’ controls from the column dropdown menu.

You can still use the ‘edit columns’ option, but these new controls offer more flexibility to make changes directly within the grid.

A further improvement is the ability to set a precise width for your grid columns.

Columns can still be resized using a mouse to expand or narrow the width, but this additional feature allows widths to be set using the exact pixels and can be applied using a keyboard.

Each of these column customisations can be saved to update an existing view or create a new personalised grid view.

Infinite scrolling is also available on read-only and editable grids to improve navigation and save time. Here, I can use infinite scrolling to move through rows of accounts without clicking through various pages.

You can also select more records. For example, with infinite scroll available within grids, it’s now possible to select up to as many as 1000 records and apply bulk actions to this selection using the command bar.

Another grid enhancement allows you to group data in your view by using a single column. In this example, we’ll group accounts by city.

This offers an alternative way to organise your view by expanding and collapsing groups using data from a selected column.

This includes flexibility to have as many groups expanded or collapsed simultaneously as needed.

Grouping works on most types of data when infinite scrolling is enabled, but this feature isn’t supported when classic grid paging is used.

One thing to highlight is that changes to grids made using these ‘group by’ controls don’t persist, so currently, these customisations can’t be saved as the default display or used to update or create a personalised and system views.

To switch back to the regular grid view, click the ungroup option in the relevant column.
You can also aggregate numerical values within a grid column.

In this example, we’re using the Dynamics 365 Sales Hub, but the same feature can be used in numerical columns for other Dynamics modules and model-driven Power Apps.

By selecting the ‘totals’ option in the dropdown menu of a numerical column, there are options for automatically showing the minimum, maximum, sum or average value of each row in the selected grid column.

For the estimated value of our open opportunities, we’ll select the option to show the total sum.

Multiple numerical columns can be aggregated simultaneously, so in the same view, we’ll adjust the view to display the average value of entries in the probability column. Any column rows that don’t include a value will be ignored in this calculation.

Again, these customisations don’t persist but can help sales and other teams interpret their data more quickly.

These are just some of the recent enhancements to model-driven apps in the latest release wave.

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