Looking for more real estate on Dynamics CRM page

This articles shows various ways in which you can increase the space on Microsoft Dynamics CRM home page. 

Hide the Get Started Pane from the home page

We always see Get started pane above each view as shown below.

If user wishes to disable/hide this pane by default then it can be done, follow below steps.

Click on options as shown below

Under General Tab, uncheck the option “show Get started panes on all lists” as shown below

If you are system administrator and you want to hide or remove this get started pane for all users then it can also be done, please follow below steps for this.

Go to Settings -- Administration -- System Settings

Under General tab, set the “Show Get started pane on all lists for all users” option to NO as shown below. After this you can see all the views without Get Started pane for all users

Collapse the Ribbon bar

In order to collapse the Ribbon bar in CRM follow the outlined steps below:

In CRM we can see arrow at top right corner as shown in below image.

         

Click on that arrow so that ribbon bar get collapsed and we can see full screen records as shown below. In below image, as you can see, only menu is visible without the Ribbon bar.

To see ribbon bar again click on the same arrow at top right corner or else you can click on menu options like view, charts, customize etc. to see the menu items

Reduce the width of the CRM Wonderbar

Reducing the width of the sitemap area in CRM is also very simple so you have more space for your CRM page

In CRM we can see resize option on the sitemap as shown in below image

Click on that resize option and resize sitemap as per your needs, you can drag it to left or right side

After resizing the sitemap you can see it as shown in below image

If you want to increase the size of sitemap again drag the resize option as shown below

Phone Formating in SSRS report

Many a times there had been requirements to format the CRM phone number in the SSRS report in following format.

We tried to achieve this by creating 12 text boxes and in each textbox we applied the below logic in the expression.

= IIF(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString().Length>=1, GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),1), “”)

It works successfully when the length of phone number is equal to 10. But it fails when the length of phone number is less than 10 and you will get an error while running this report.

To resolve this issue we found a work around for this.

First you need to format the data using the SQL query and PAD the spaces into the field. As given below.

LEFT(ISNULL(telephone1, '') + '          ', 10)

The above statement will format the telephone1 attribute. If the user enters errorneuos or junk data into the telephone1 field like “99”, then the above statement will return the value “99        ”, i.e. 99 + additional 8 spaces . And in the textboxes expressions you just need to write the following expressions without checking the IIF condition.

= GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),1)

= GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),2)

= GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),3)

= GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),4)

Hope this helps!