Microsoft has transformed the settings from the classic user-interface settings to a new way of managing the settings via the Power Platform Admin Setting app. This week I faced a setting where I believe unfortunately the classic interface has more advantages: create Word and Excel templates.
Most people will remember the following popup that you can find in Settings > Templates > Document Templates. This would allow you to design your own Word or Excel templates that you can then use for example to design your Quote document.
You would select either Excel Template or Word Template and the entity that the template is for.
In the next step, once you select Select Entity, you will see an overview of the relationships that you want to make available in your template in order to design the document. The benefit of this form if you ask me, is that it gives you a nice overview of all relations.
New UI to create Word and Excel templates
As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, a lot, perhaps all settings, are now managed via the Power Platform Admin Settings app. So when navigating to the Business section of the menu, you can find the Templates there. So this is now the place to create Word and Excel templates 😎
Unfortunately, the Document templates are not at the level yet for a couple of reasons, if you ask me.
1. Initiation of new templates
The menu is not working as expected, at least according to my expectations 🤣 When you have selected the Document templates you get the overview with the templates available. When you select + New you will see only the Download Excel Template available and no option for Word 😲
The funny thing is when you select any record in the view of templates, the option to Download Word Template is now available
2. Options contain HTML code
The new user interface allows you to select the Entity as the first step, which is the same as in the classic user interface. But when checking the relationships there are now dropdowns. As you can see in the image below the options do contain HTML code in it.
3. User experience
The last thing thing is causing me to vote for Team Classic is the user experience. When you want to include all relationships you can still use the Select All for all relationships so that is still the same. If you have some hands-on experience you probably know it is good to only choose the relationships that are needed because of:
- performance
- lower risk of users selecting the wrong relationships
Now trying to analyse for example 71 items in a dropdown and selecting the individual items that you want to be included in a template is a bit painful in this experience. So hopefully Microsoft will fix the first two issues and will work on the user experience of the last form so it will be easier to select items in longer lists.
