Dynamics CRM 2013: Field Description displayed in Tooltip

Paul Nieuwelaar, 06 September 2013

When creating or editing a field in CRM 2013, we can specify the Description of the field much like in CRM 2011. However in CRM 2013 those descriptions are also displayed as a tooltip when users hover over a field label on a form.

In CRM 2011, the Description on fields was rarely used, as it was only ever displayed when viewing the field from the customization side of things, but never to the end users. On the form, when you hovered over a field label the tooltip would simply display the field label, which was not so helpful.

If you’re upgrading from CRM 2011 to CRM 2013, it might be worth going through all your existing fields (on main entities anyway) and providing a brief description about what each field is for.

Microsoft have already led the way with this, providing details descriptions about all the main fields by default.

Also, if you had previously added developer notes on custom fields, or anything that was not intended for the end users to see, these should also be viewed :)

From now on, when we’re creating fields, instead of completely ignoring that Description field (I know I’m not the only one!), we can now add something to better identify how it should be used. This also means we can be a little bit more conservative on our field names, and let the Description explain how to use the field, rather than having a massive field name/label.