"Advanced" Advanced Find Techniques

One of the great features in Microsoft CRM 3.0 is the ability to search and find CRM data based on complex filter criteria. In particular, the Advanced Find feature lets users create their own queries and then save those queries for later re-use. Unfortunately, we didn't get to spend as much time as would have liked covering Advanced Find in our book, so I thought we'd share some of the more "advanced" Advanced Find techniques we use for ourselves.

Of course, I start every day by trying to figure out which activities I should work on. Unfortunately there isn't an out of the box Activity view for "My Overdue Activities". I can see My Activities (both open and closed) or all Open Activities (for all users) but neither of those really suits my needs. I want to focus in on the activities due today (or overdue) for just me. To get this data, I created this Advanced Find:

This view uses two techniques that many users don't even exist!

• You can group multiple filter criteria together using AND or OR conditions. In this screenshot you can see that the view looks for activities with a due date in the last 99 years OR with a due date equal to today.

• You can select data from related entities. Instead of seeing one monster list of activities for Leads/Opportunities/Accounts/Cases/etc, I prefer to tackle them one group at a time. So I selected Regarding(Opportunity) in my Advanced Find, so Microsoft CRM will only display activities if the Regarding field is linked to an Opportunity. I could also add a filter for attributes from the Opportunity entity such as Rating or Est. Revenue but I don't need that for my purposes.

After I create my view, I save it with a descriptive name like "Overdue Activities (Opps)" and then I quickly access it from the View list under Saved Views any time I want in the future. In addition, I can also share this view with other users or teams who might benefit from it. Sharing Saved Views is nice because you can have one power user create the more complex views for a team of users so they can benefit from it without having to go through the leg work of understanding the more complex Advanced Finds.

If you're wondering why I selected Last 99 Years for my due date, it's because (believe it or not) Microsoft CRM does not have date filter criteria for in the past! The screenshot below shows all of the date filter choices you have, but not one of them is "in the past" or "overdue". Of course it's a simple workaround to just select last 99 years but I hope they add this criteria in the next release.