Modern Action Bar

Enabled for	Public preview	General availability
Users, automatically	Sep 15, 2022	Oct 3, 2022

Business value

You can now use a promoted section of the action bar to help users learn the product. You can tailor it to fit the needs of your industry, company, or yourself. Add actions that you want to make available in an easily discoverable and consistent way across the product for new users to quickly learn the product, or tailor it to your business-specific needs for proficient users.

Feature details

The action bar is updated with improvements for all existing customers as they are updated to 2022 release wave 2.

• The action bar is better at keeping related actions together and avoiding the same action being available in multiple menus. This helps reduce clutter and confusion, especially for users new to Business Central.

  

• The Navigate menu that was previously available in some pages has been retired, and its contents merged with the entity menu. The entity menu is the one bearing the name of the entity displayed on a page, such as Customer on Customer Card or Order on Sales Order, and it is now the primary menu for information related to the current record.

  

• You can now use split buttons in certain places. Split buttons are well known in other Microsoft products as a combination of a button and a menu. This type of control gives you quick one-click reach to the first action in a menu via the left button part and access to other related actions via the right dropdown part.

  

• Based on user feedback and our statistics of how pages are used, certain actions are in more prominent places in the action bar. This reduces the number of clicks to reach frequently used actions and makes relevant actions more discoverable.

• You now have more flexibility in the ways you can customize menus to suit your purpose and preference. That means previous limitations to which and where actions could be moved no longer apply. This greatly empowers users in personalizing pages and in configuring profiles.

  

Optional changes to the action bar in 2022 release wave 2

The following additional optimizations are available to all upgraded customers as well, but not enabled right away with the update. To activate the optionally available improvements to the action bar, choose the Try it out action in the Get started column, or have your admin choose All Users in the Enable for field in the Feature Management page.

1. On documents, cards, worksheets, and listplus pages, the Process tab is renamed to Home to better align with the ribbon terminology that users see in other Microsoft products.
2. On document pages that have Post and Release actions, the actions are now presented as split buttons in the Home tab. This provides better discoverability and one-click access to these frequently used actions. On several other pages, certain actions have been grouped into split buttons when the actions are strongly connected by the effect they have. For example, a new split button is created for the actions Correct, Cancel, and Create Corrective Credit Memo. This provides one-click access to Correct which is the most frequently used among the three.
3. With documents, cards, worksheets, and listplus pages, the action bar is now presented in the pinned state when opened for the first time. This helps you to discover relevant actions in the action bar and provides one-click reach to actions, without first pinning the action bar yourself.
4. With document pages that have a Lines subpage, or any other page having a subpage, the subpage’s actions are now visible right away, without requiring a click on “More options.”

Existing customers that are updated and new customers can choose to switch off the Modern Action Bar feature. For example, if an extension isn't compatible, or if the optimization's changes to the user interface require time to introduce to users.

See also

Personalizing the action bar and menus (docs)