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Drill Down and Drill Around with Sage MAS 500 Explorer

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 by Julie Stankey

As a MAS 500 user, you have most likely opened the “Explore” tasks that reside throughout the MAS 500 menu system. Basically the “Explore” tasks are views that have been developed to inquire on the data that resides in the MAS 500 system.

The real power of the Explorer is found in its features that enable you to:

• Easily filter the data to find the information you want
• Easily export the resulting data to excel
• Customize the columns to include only the data you want and save these customizations for future use
• Jump to associated MAS 500 tasks right from the explorer record

I refer to the explorer as the “drill down and drill around tool”. The best way to describe the power of the explorer is to give an example:

Let’s say Sam knows the customer name and can find the record in the explorer. With 1 or 2 clicks he can view things like open quotes, open orders and actually launch a sales order.

Let’s say Sam finds the sales order his is looking for. By drilling into the sales order he can now see the items on the sales order, the shipment information as well as pulling up the sales order.

Once you’ve used the Explorer to find the data you are looking for, you can launch MAS 500 or back up to where you started.

The Explorer gives us the power to drill down and around to find data associated with a record. If you know excel this tool gives you a familiar look making it easy to learn and help you in your daily work. 

By Jeff Steel, an Ohio Sage MAS software consultant