Lookup and Quick Find create a better user experience

Dynamics 365  - Lookup and Quick Find 

Improving User Adoption

Searching for information in Dynamics 365 provides a means to quickly locate data. This could be contacts, account, or custom entity data.  If you want to improve user adoption you will want to educate your application users on efficient searching techniques.  Here is a simple, but somewhat hidden concept on leveraging quick find for lookup fields.

The Scenario

Your users often need to quickly locate account information when creating contacts. This could apply to any custom entity as well. But for this simple scenario let's use account.  An account has fields for name, account number, phone, etc.  But let's say the users need to locate accounts in a given city.  Out of the box searching is only done on select fields and does not include city.  

The Solution

All entities have 2 out of the box views.  The Lookup view, and the Quick Find view.  These 2 views work together to deliver the results you need.

First you can edit the Lookup view to add additional columns to display.  So let's say our user needs ability to search on Account City.  We know we can add the column to the search view display columns. But now we can add the column to the "Find Columns".

This simple change provides search ability in our Account View display as you can see below.

A bonus to this field addition is that now in the form Lookup fields for Account we can also search on City.  See here for this example of account lookup on a contact form.

This is not necessarily obvious to everyone, especially new users. This great no-code feature can alleviate user frustration, improve adoption, and simplify application support.

Thanks for reading.