- Feature
- Conditional visibility with updated Word add-in
- Availability
- Generally available (October 2026)
- Industry focus
- Wine and spirits importers and distributors
Wine and spirits distributors sell to very different customers: restaurants, independent shops, supermarkets, export buyers and bonded warehouses. Their documents have to reflect that. A duty-paid invoice to a restaurant looks different from an in-bond sale to an exporter. Historically, that meant either cluttered documents full of empty sections or multiple layouts for each scenario. Business Central 29.0 offers a better way.
The industry challenge
A single invoice layout for a wine distributor might need to show, depending on the sale:
- Excise duty lines, only for duty-paid sales
- Bonded warehouse references, only for in-bond transactions
- Export details, only for overseas customers
- Discount columns, only when discounts were given
- Notes about vintage substitutions, only when relevant
Without conditional logic, documents either showed empty fields and columns, which confused customers, or needed several separate layouts, which multiplied maintenance. Adding conditional visibility to Word layouts used to require technical XML editing that few people were comfortable with.
What Microsoft delivered in Business Central 29.0
According to Microsoft, report layouts can now be designed with conditional visibility using a new HideIf logic control in the Word add-in. The control can use boolean fields in the dataset to decide whether content is shown.
An MVP walk-through describes two groups of controls on a new Visibility tab:
- Hide If Empty, with options to hide a field if zero, hide an empty table, hide an empty table row, or hide an empty table column
- Hide If False, which hides content based on any boolean field in the report, including boolean fields added through report extensions
Where the value shows up
| Business area | Impact for a wine and spirits distributor |
|---|---|
| Document clarity | Customers see only the sections relevant to their sale |
| Compliance | Duty and bonded details appear when they're required |
| Layout maintenance | One adaptable layout instead of several variants |
| Professional image | No empty columns or zero-value lines on invoices |
| Design speed | Conditional logic added without editing XML |
The real benefit is having one smart layout. A single invoice can serve restaurants, retailers and exporters, showing exactly what each one needs.
A worked scenario
Consider an importer of European wines that sells duty-paid to restaurants and shops and in bond to export customers (an illustrative example). It used to maintain three invoice layouts and often printed the wrong one.
Using the updated Word add-in, the finance manager builds one invoice layout. The excise duty table uses Hide Empty Table, so it disappears for in-bond sales. A bonded warehouse reference section uses Hide If False, driven by a boolean field that marks in-bond transactions. The discount column uses Hide Empty Table Column. The business now runs one invoice layout that adapts to every type of sale.
Adoption considerations
- Identify the conditions. List which sections should appear for which types of sale.
- Check your boolean fields. Hide If False needs boolean fields in the dataset. A report extension may be needed to add them.
- Test every scenario. Print invoices for each customer type to confirm the right sections appear.
- Keep compliance text visible when required. Make sure mandatory statements never get hidden by mistake.
- Combine with themes and headers. Use conditional body layouts with reusable themes and headers for full consistency.
The bottom line
Wine and spirits distributors handle complex, varied transactions, and their documents need to reflect each one accurately. Conditional visibility in the Business Central 29.0 Word add-in lets one layout adapt intelligently to every sale. That means cleaner documents for customers and less layout maintenance for the business.
If your business maintains several versions of the same document, it's worth exploring conditional layouts with an experienced Business Central adviser.
Sources: Microsoft roadmap 573329 · Dynamics 365 Lab: Use conditional visibility in the updated Word add-in