Tip of the Week #93 – Using NAV & Excel to Compare Data

Developer Rikard Hult sends in this week’s helpful tip.

Compare Data

Sometimes NAV behaves in a way that you don’t understand – for example, you have two items that you think are identical except for their names, and you want to use the items somewhere in NAV but end up with a different result.

In this example, we have two items that should be connected to templates in PrintVis; Item no. 1 works perfectly, but item no. 2 would not load the template into the case order.

You could use Excel for a simple way to see all the differences between the two records, in this case two items.

Mark the first item and zoom on the line (Ctrl+win+Alt+F1 or About this page).

Click on the Microsoft Excel button at the top.

Excel opens, on tab no. 2 all Table Fields values are listed.

Mark Column A and B and copy the columns.

Minimize Excel, zoom on the next item and export to Excel in same way.

Open Tab No. 2 and paste the columns from the other spreadsheet in column D+E.

In Column C, create a formula that compares B and E, copy the formula to all lines in the column.

Mark the entire sheet and activate the filter on the sheet; filter on FALSE in column C.

Now we can see that item no. 2 missing its template ID, Job and version.

Thank you Rikard!