Advanced Filters in Dynamics 365 – Part 1

Filter data from 2 or more entities with just a few clicks.

Transcript

This is Steve Pestillo from P2 Automation. In this next series of videos, I’m going to show you some more advanced filtering techniques that you can use in Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. These filters will involve multiple tables. And we’ll start with something we all have, Accounts and Contacts.

Here in our demo environment, we refer to Accounts as Organizations but it’s basically the same thing you’re used to. It’s a list of companies. And you can see we have 262 companies in this demo environment.

Let’s say I want to see a list of organizations that have at least one contact connected to the organization. To do that, first we need to understand the different types of relationships that are available. And there are really three types, a one-to-many relationship, a many-to-one relationship, and a many-to-many relationship. Accounts and Contacts is an example of a one-to-many relationship. So for every account or company, you can have many contacts. And we’ll start with that one.

So if I want to know how many of these 262 organizations have a contact, I can click on Edit Filters, and we already have this set up to show Active Organizations. I’ll simply click Add related entity. And remember, that’s a one-to-many relationship. So you don’t want to be up here, you want to scroll down to your one-to-many relationships, starting here. 

And we want to see contacts that are linked by the company name. And this is saying we want to show all contacts that contain data. So we want to actually remove this filter. And out of the 262 active accounts, we have 154 that have at least one contact.

You can apply different criteria to this as well. So let’s say we want to see a list of organizations that have a contact with an email address, because we want to reach out to these 154 companies and we want to see how many of them actually have somebody with an email address. Click Edit Filters again, and then down under the Contacts table, we want to add a row. And we want to show where the email address exists. So where the email field contains data, it doesn’t really matter what the email address is, we just want to see that they have context that have one. So out of 154 active organizations, only 116 actually have a contact with an email address. So that paints a picture. That means we have 38 companies that don’t have a contact with an email address.  

So very quickly we know we can’t send out just an email. We have to send out a phone call or a mail piece through the US mail or some other form of communication. But this is a really quick way to get that information so you can make a better business decision.

If you’d like information on how we can help you capture data out of your CRM, reach out to us today at www.p2automation.com. And remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel.