A small but important change often slips under the radar of the What’s New kinds of documents. One of those is the standard length of the Name field in G/L Account table. I’ve just noticed that in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 the length of this field has been increased from 30 characters to 50 characters.

While this seams a minor thing, it’s actually a huge improvement. If 30 characters was not enough in previous versions, increasing it was not a simple thing to do, and required you to change thirty or so other objects as well. It was in fact one of those annoying things that you better got used to, rather than changed. Yes, I’ve seen customers who insisted on changing it, but most of them simply gave in.

In NAV 2013, this change is not only about G/L Account – the length of all Name and Description fields in all master tables has been consistently set to 50. In the previous versions of NAV the length varied between 30 and 50, but now all of the master table Name and Description fields are of length 50.

A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.