Picture your typical morning in Dynamics 365. You open a list page, scroll past six columns you’ve never once used, and squint at the one column you actually need because it’s crammed off to the right. You do this every day and you’ve just accepted it as the cost of doing business.
It doesn’t have to be.
This is the first post in a five part series called “Human in the Loop, With Tips: D365 Finance & Operations.” Each post pairs a bigger idea about working alongside AI and automation with one genuinely useful, often overlooked tip for the system itself. Today’s tip: personalizing your workspace so the screen finally looks like it was built for your job, not a generic one.
The idea in one minute: As AI and automation take over more of the repetitive first-pass work in Finance and Operations, more of your day becomes review and judgment calls. That means your screen needs to show you what matters and hide what doesn’t. Dynamics 365 has a built in personalization toolbar that lets you reorder columns, hide fields, add fields that aren’t shown by default, and save the layout so it sticks around. It takes ten minutes. It’s not a nice-to-have anymore, it’s how you keep up.
Why this matters more than it used to
Here’s the shift happening in a lot of D365 environments right now. Routine, rules based tasks like matching invoices, flagging exceptions, or drafting the first pass of a reconciliation are increasingly getting a head start from automation and AI agents. That’s genuinely good news, but it changes what your job looks like day to day. Less data entry, more reviewing what the system already did and deciding whether it’s right.
Judgment doesn’t automate well. Spotting that a vendor’s payment terms look off, or that a journal entry needs a second look before it posts, still needs a person who knows the business. That’s you. If your screen is cluttered with fields you never touch while the number you actually need is buried three columns over, you’re slower at exactly the part of the job that still requires a human.
Getting into personalization mode
You’ve got a few ways in, and once you know them you’ll never go hunting for a menu again.
- Press Ctrl+Shift+P anywhere on the page.
- Select the Settings gear icon on the navigation bar, then choose Personalize.
- Right-click an element and choose Personalize this page from its property window.
- On the Action Pane’s Options tab, look in the Personalize group for Personalize this page.
Any of these opens the Personalization toolbar, according to Microsoft’s guide to personalizing the user experience, and that’s where the real work happens.
What you can actually do
With that toolbar open, the Hide tool tucks away fields you never reference. Add fields brings in anything from the page’s definition that isn’t shown by default, so if you need a column that Microsoft left off the standard view, you just add it. You can drag columns into a different order or grab a column’s edge to resize it. The Move tool relocates whole sections, you can expand or collapse FastTabs by default, and you can even pin fields into a FastTab’s header summary so you see them without expanding anything.
💡 One I find genuinely useful: Add to workspace pulls relevant information onto your workspace as a tile, list, or link, so the things you check daily are waiting the moment you log in instead of buried three clicks deep.
Saving it, and undoing it if you mess up
If the page uses saved views, save your changes to that view explicitly to keep them. If it doesn’t, your changes save automatically. Either way, close the browser and come back tomorrow, your layout is still there.
Made a mess of it? Open the Personalization toolbar again and select Clear. That resets the page (or, on a page with saved views, just the current view) back to its default state. Fair warning: it can’t be undone, so it’s worth a quick look before you commit.
The small habit that pays off
None of this is complicated. That’s the point. Ten minutes of hiding fields you don’t use and pulling the ones you check daily to the front of the grid means less time scanning and more time thinking about what you’re looking at. As more of the routine work gets handled before it reaches you, that’s exactly where your attention needs to go.
Thank you for reading!
Next up in the series: “Save Yourself the Re-Filtering,” where we’ll look at how to stop rebuilding the same filters every single morning.
Sources
Interested in learning more? Below are some of my latest posts:
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