How To Get The Most From The Dynamics 365 Timeline

The Dynamics 365 Sales Timeline keeps all your customer interactions organised in one place. You’ll see activities, messages, appointments and updates arranged neatly in order. This makes staying on top of things much simpler.

With the timeline, you can easily add new tasks and tailor it to suit your needs. AI highlights offer useful insights to help you make informed decisions.

We’re going to focus on using the timeline in contact records

What can you see in the Dynamics timeline

• The timeline can show all Dynamics activity types as well as notes and posts about the contact

Activities you can see in the timeline

Each item is shown as a separate block in the timeline

What can you do from the Dynamics Timeline?

Actions

Each timeline entry can have several action icons beside it. These include actions such as

• Close or complete the Activity
• Open Record
  • This opens the full record in your browser
• Pin
  • This pins this entry to the top of your timeline
• Delete
• Email actions (reply, forward etc)
• Assign

At the base of each entry you’ll see an option to expand the item to see more details. This could include things like

• viewing the opportunity details
• the email message
• the phone call entry

When you pin an item it stays at the top of the timeline for all users

Pinning Items

You can use the pin icon on an activity entry to pin items permanently to the top of your timeline. This affects all users’ timelines

Not all Dynamics systems will have this feature enabled. Please contact us if you’d like it enabled on your system.

There’s more about pinning records on the Microsoft website

• You can also click the refresh icon to view the latest entries in your timeline

Manage Emails

You can read an entire email in the timeline by clicking the view more link

If you have long threaded email conversations in your timeline you can group them using the setting below

When you’re viewing emails in the conversation view, you can see older emails in the conversation by clicking the Show more link

Add notes and files

To add a note about the contact, click beside the pencil icon and the note editor will open.

Each note has a title, an area for formatted text and an option to add a file attachment (using the paperclip icon)

Search the timeline

At the top of the timeline, you’ll see a magnifying glass icon. Add some search text and press enter to search the timeline.

Create activities from the timeline

To create a new record

• Click the plus icon at the top of the timeline.
• Choose from common record types

You’ll see a form appear, pre-filled with the contact’s relevant details

Your administrator can choose whether the form is a

• Quick create form : pops out from the left of your screen, or
• Main form: fills your screen with a form over the top of the contact form.

After you complete the details on the new record, you’ll go back to the original contact form

Filtering your Dynamics activity timeline

Your administrator chooses which record types you can see as a default on your timeline. If there are any record types missing, ask them to enable it for your organisation.

Be aware that some record types may be very noisy and place a lot of entries in your colleagues’ timelines

If you’d like to filter which records you see in the timeline for the contact you’re currently viewing, you can do this using the filter icon

• Click the filter icon
• Choose the record type, activity type and statuses you’d like to see on your timeline

This filter is temporary and is only applied to this session and this record.

If you want to save filters, you can use bookmarks

Bookmarking timeline filters

Bookmarking filters on your timeline is a new feature introduced by Microsoft in autumn 2023

You may have noticed the bookmark icon appear at the top of your activity timeline

You’ll see it in on record pages in entities such as Contacts, Accounts, Orders etc

So now, when you filter your timeline you can save those filters to use again in the future.

If you don’t know how to use filters on your timeline, read this Microsoft article

For example, if you want to only see emails in the activity timeline:

• Click the filter icon

• Then expand the Activity type group

• And choose E-mail.
• Now your timeline shows Emails only.
• To save this filtered view of your timeline, click the bookmark icon

• Choose Add bookmark
• Give the bookmark a name and make it the default if you like, then Save
• You can also delete and edit existing bookmarks using the 3 dot menu beside each bookmark

These changes only affect the layout of your timeline, not your colleague’s

How to customise your Dynamics timeline

Your administrator can customise many parts of the timeline, on a granular level. The settings are described in this Microsoft Learn article

AI highlights

Copilot can read and summarise your timeline to produce top-level highlights of the important activities.

Your administrator will need to enable this feature

Timeline FAQs