Word layouts for Business Central document reports have always been a practical choice for invoices, quotes, orders, and other documents you send to customers or suppliers. Designing those layouts, however, has not always been straightforward. Controlling what appears and what stays hidden depending on the data in the document required either manual workarounds or developer involvement.
Back in September 2024, I covered the first preview of the new Word add-in when it appeared in the BC 2024 wave 2 sandbox. The add-in has grown steadily since then, and this post covers what it can do today and how to use it.
What the Add-in Is
The Dynamics 365 Business Central Word add-in is a free extension for Microsoft Word. Once installed, it adds a Business Central tab to the Word ribbon. From that tab you can insert data fields into your layout, add invisible comments that help you and your colleagues maintain the file, and apply controls that hide certain content automatically depending on the data in the report.
The add-in works on top of Word layouts for document reports. It does not change how you run or schedule reports in Business Central. It only affects how the layout file is built.
What Version You Need
The add-in requires Business Central version 25 (2024 release wave 2) or later. If you are on an older version, the add-in will not work with your environment. The data picker task pane, which makes inserting fields significantly easier, requires version 27 (2025 release wave 2) or later. If you are unsure which version your environment is running, check with your partner or administrator.
Installing the Add-in
Open Microsoft Word, go to the Home tab, and select Get Add-ins. Search for Dynamics 365 Business Central Word Add-in and click Add when it appears. A Business Central tab will appear in your Word ribbon. You only need to do this once. The add-in is then available in all your Word documents going forward.
Adding Fields to a Layout
If you are on version 27 or later, the add-in includes a task pane that makes it straightforward to insert data fields into your layout. Select Add Data from the Business Central ribbon tab to open it. The pane shows a tree with three sections: Data, Labels, and Report information.
Data contains the fields from the report, such as customer name, address, line amounts, and quantities. Labels contains the captions and headings used in the report. Report information contains general details about the report itself, such as the date it was printed.
To insert a field, click in the Word document where you want it to appear, then select the field in the task pane and click Add field. For a section that repeats for each line on a document, such as invoice lines, select the table row in Word, then select the corresponding data item in the task pane and click Add repeater.
Layout Comments
If you maintain report layouts regularly, you will know the frustration of opening a file someone else built with no explanation of why certain choices were made. The add-in includes a comment control that lets you embed notes directly inside the layout file. These notes are visible while you are editing the layout in Word, but they never appear in the printed or emailed document.
To add a comment, type your note in the document, select it, and choose Business Central > Insert layout comment. You can also place your cursor first, click Insert layout comment, and then type inside the control that appears. Clicking anywhere inside a comment shows a Hidden Comment label, so it is always clear what will and will not print.
Useful things to add as comments include a short description of what the layout is for, a note about a section that is not obvious, or a simple change log table with dates and descriptions of what was modified.
Hiding Zero Values
Some fields on a document show a zero when no value applies, which can look untidy on a printed invoice or quote. The Hide Field if Zero control tells Business Central to leave that field blank in the output whenever its value is zero, rather than printing the number.
Select the field in the Word document and choose Business Central > Hide if empty > Hide Field if Zero. The change only affects this layout. You can have one version of a layout that shows zeros and another that suppresses them, without any changes needed in Business Central itself.
Hiding Empty Tables
Some document layouts include sections that are only relevant in certain situations. A terms and conditions block, a section for special instructions, or a table of attached items might only apply to some documents and not others. If that section has no data for a particular document, you probably do not want an empty frame appearing on the page.
The Hide Empty Table control handles this. Select the table in Word and choose Business Central > Hide if empty > Hide Empty Table. When the document is generated and that section has no data, the entire table is removed from the output automatically.
Hiding Empty Table Rows
Within a repeating section, you may have rows that are sometimes filled in and sometimes not. Rather than hiding the entire table, the Hide Empty Table Row control removes individual rows where a specific field has no value. Select the field that determines whether the row is relevant and choose Business Central > Hide if empty > Hide Empty Table Row. Rows where that field is empty are skipped when the document is generated.
Hiding Empty Table Columns
The most precise of the hide controls is Hide Empty Table Column. It removes an entire column from the document when none of the lines in the report carry a value for that field. A practical example is a discount column on an invoice: if no discount applies to any line on that invoice, the column, including its heading, disappears entirely from the printed document.
To set this up, select the field in the column heading row of the table and choose Business Central > Hide if empty > Hide Empty Table Column. You can also combine this with Hide Field if Zero on the same field in the data rows below, so that a column containing only zeros is treated the same as a column with no data at all.
What the Add-in Cannot Do
The add-in works with the data that the report already provides. If a field you need does not appear in the task pane, it is not part of the report and cannot be added through the layout alone. That kind of change requires someone with development access to Business Central. The hide controls are also straightforward: a field is either shown or hidden based on whether it has a value. More complex conditions, such as hiding a section based on a customer category or a document type, are beyond what the add-in currently supports.
What Is Coming Next
In March 2026, Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft responsible for Business Central reporting, announced a new preview version of the Word add-in on the Office AppStore. It also introduces an experimental table builder, which is described as coming to general availability in a minor update to version 28 after launch.
The new version of the Word add-in is now live if you want to try it.
- See a demo here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9R4cypruzo
This session covers
- major upgrades to the Word add‑in,
- including improved data picker UX,
- search,
- dark mode,
- and the new table builder.
You’ll also learn about layout lifecycle management, multi-language defaults, refreshed report selection pages, and 36 new document APIs. Perfect for developers, partners, and power users designing or automating Business Central documents.
Chapters:
- 0:33 Why did we invest in document reporting for this wave?
- 1:09 Updated Word add-in
- 6:25 Lifecycle status for layouts
- 8:24 Company-level default language
- 10:48 Tooltips now available on all reports
- 11:18 Modernization of report selection pages
- 12:04 New PDF APIs for documents
- 13:16 Learn more about document reporting
- 13:44 Related sessions
- 14:05 General resources
You can follow Kennie on LinkedIn for early announcements on reporting features in Business Central.
Where to Go Next
The official documentation for the Word add-in is available on Microsoft Learn: Use the Word add-in for report layouts. For a broader introduction to working with Word layouts in Business Central, the Creating a Word layout report page is a good starting point.
What Would Make Word Layouts possibly a Replacement for RDLC?
The add-in is moving in a clear direction. Each wave closes another gap between what Word layouts can do and what RDLC layouts have always supported. But for anyone who has built serious RDLC layouts for Business Central, there are still some meaningful differences worth naming.
- Conditional content based on field values.
- The current hide controls are binary: a field or table is either shown or hidden based on whether it has a value. RDLC layouts support expressions that show or hide content based on what a field actually contains, such as hiding a section only for credit memos, or showing a message only when the balance exceeds a threshold. Word layouts have no equivalent today.
- Calculated totals and subtotals in the layout.
- RDLC allows you to define grouping and aggregation directly in the layout, so you can show subtotals per category, running totals, or page-level summaries without any changes to the report object. In Word layouts, all totals must come from the report dataset. If the data does not include it, the layout cannot calculate it.
- Page-level controls.
- RDLC gives you fine-grained control over page breaks, page numbers, repeated headers across pages, and content that only appears on the first or last page. Word layouts handle some of this through Word’s own section and header features, but the behaviour is less predictable and harder to maintain, especially across different printer drivers and PDF renderers.
- Conditional formatting.
- In RDLC you can change font colour, weight, or background based on a field value, for example highlighting overdue amounts in red or bolding a line when a condition is met. Word layouts currently have no mechanism for this. What you design is what prints, regardless of the data.
None of this is a criticism of the direction Microsoft is taking. Word layouts are genuinely easier to work with for straightforward document design, and the add-in has made real progress. But if you are evaluating whether to migrate an existing complex RDLC layout to Word, these are the questions worth asking before you start. For simple to moderately complex document layouts, the add-in already gets you there. For layouts that rely heavily on expressions, dynamic formatting, or complex aggregation, RDLC remains the more capable choice for now.
If you have suggestions for features that would help close the gap between Word and RDLC layouts, leave a comment below. The more concrete the use case, the better.
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