Logging on using the SAP GUI

- [Instructor] We're now going to log on to the SAP GUI or GUI. GUI stands for graphical user
interface. To log on, we need the SAP software installed correctly and an internet connection.
Oftentimes companies will require employees to be connected to the company's network to
establish a connection with the system. This could mean we need to log onto our company's VPN
when we're working remotely. When installed properly there'll be an icon on our desktop or a
windows menu option in the SAP front end folder called SAP log-on. Double-clicking on SAP log-on
will open the SAP log on pad. When our SAP system is set up properly with at least one connection
created, we'll see it in our connections list. In our test system, the connection we'll use is commercial
SAP S/4 HANA 1709. So we'll select it and click log on. This opens up the SAP log on screen. The first
field we want to look at is called client. Clients are a way to separate data. For example, many
organizations will have a testing client to test different functionality and a production client where
all the real world operations are being done. The client field is where we enter the number of the
database we're accessing. In this case, client 150 is our test client, so we need to enter 150 in the
client field. Next is the user field. This is where we enter the username. And in our test system we'll
enter username student001. This field is not case sensitive. Next we need to enter our password.
Each organization can customize their own password rules. The first time we log on to a new client,
SAP requires us to change our password. We'll enter the password now, and we can either press
enter on our keyboard, or we can go to more user log on. We have successfully logged on to SAP,
and this brings us to the SAP easy access screen where we can begin running transactions.
Menu tree navigation in SAP

- [Instructor] Now that we've logged on to SAP, we're here on the SAP easy access screen. To do
anything in SAP, we need to enter what is called a transaction. Transactions can be entered using
two methods. First, transaction codes can be entered in our command field. The other way to enter
a transaction is using the menu tree. In our SAP menu screen, the folders and their associated
transactions are organized by business area. Let's imagine that we are looking for accounts
receivable transactions so we can post incoming payments. We're going to use the SAP menu tree to
drill down to find the appropriate transaction. First, we'll expand the accounting folder. Then we'll
expand the financial accounting folder. Here, we see the accounts receivable folder and can expand
that. Again, we want to post incoming payments. This transaction is under document entry, so we'll
expand that folder. Here, we see F-28 incoming payments. To enter this transaction, we'll double-
click on that line. We have now entered the post incoming payments transaction using the SAP
menu tree. The menu tree is one effective way to drill down by business area and navigate to our
needed transaction.
Transaction code navigation in SAP

- [Instructor] Again, to do anything in SAP, we need to enter into what is called a transaction.
Transactions can be entered using the SAP menu tree or by using transaction codes. In the SAP
world, these are often referred to as T-codes. A T-code consists of letters, numbers, and
punctuation. Every transaction in SAP has a T-code associated with it. Navigating with T-codes is
usually much faster than drilling down using the SAP menu tree. SAP users almost always navigate
using T-codes and most users end up memorizing the T-codes that they're using often. A quick
search can help us out if we do forget a specific T-code. To navigate using a transaction code, we'll
start on the SAP easy access screen. We'll click in the command field. This command field is at the
top of every screen in SAP. We want to enter into the post incoming payments for accounts
receivable transaction. The T-code for this is f-28, and we enter that directly into our command field.
Transaction codes are not case sensitive. We'll then press enter. We have now entered the post
incoming payments transaction using the T-code f-28. If we forget what transaction code we're in,
there's an easy way to find out. First, we'll go to the SAP menu bar at the top. Clicking the left arrow,
we'll expand our system information. When we click HS4(1)150, it brings up a dropdown of all of our
system information. Clicking on transaction shows our transaction code which is f-28. A really helpful
hint in SAP that works most of the time is understanding that transaction codes ending in 01 are
create, T-codes ending in 02 are change and T-codes ending in 03 are display transactions. For
example, mm01 is a transaction code to create a material. Mm02 is the T-code to change a material
and mm03 is the T-code to display a material. Finally, whenever we encounter a transaction code
that starts with the letters Y or Z, we know that this is a custom transaction. Transaction codes
starting with Y or Z are not standard out of the box transactions from SAP.
User menu and settings in SAP

- [Instructor] Let's talk about adjusting some of our user settings in SAP. The SAP GUI has many
different settings that can be changed. The setting changes are tied to our SAP login ID and they'll
stay in place every time we log in to the system. First, let's talk about changing our theme. To do
this, we'll go to more, SAP GUI settings and actions, options. On the left side, under visual design,
we'll click theme settings. We can see that our current theme selected is the Belize theme. If we
chose another theme and clicked apply, our change of theme would show up the next time we
logged into the system. Just be aware that by changing these themes, the menu bars and the
buttons sometimes change from words to icons and vice versa. There are many other keyboard and
visualization settings that can be adjusted. Let's look at one now called tool tips. to do this, we'll look
under interactive design and click notifications. It's recommended the new users turn the tool tip on.
This means that whenever we hover over a button or icon in the system, a hint will pop up to
describe what the icon or button actually does. We'll change our tool tip delay from no tool tip to
medium, 0.5 seconds. We'll click apply and OK. The third helpful setting we want to turn on is called
displaying technical names. Right now, when we look under our favorites folder, on the left side of
the screen, it says create material. There's no transaction code showing. Let's turn on our display
technical names. To do this, we'll go more, extras, settings. The settings menu has four options that
are all preferences about our SAP easy access screen. For this setting, we're interested in the last
option. We'll click the check box to activate it to display our technical names. Then we'll press
continue. We now see under our favorites folder on the left side of the screen MM01 create material
where MM01 is the transaction code for this favorite. This is a helpful way to start memorizing the T
codes we need to use frequently. There are many user settings we can customize in SAP. We can
continuously fine tune to make the software work best for our needs.
Working with favorites on the SAP easy access screen

- [Instructor] Many end users find themselves using the same transactions over and over. We're
going to look at using the favorites folder on the SAP Easy Access screen as a shortcut to all the
transactions we regularly use. Let's walk through the steps to add, delete, download, and upload our
favorites. First, we'll add a transaction to the favorites folder. To do this, we'll right click on the
favorites folder and click insert transaction. We're prompted to enter a transaction code. We'll enter
mm03, which is Display Material and click continue. We now see mm03 Display Material under our
favorites folder. We'll do this again for the Change Material transaction. We'll right click on favorites,
choose insert transaction, and enter the transaction code. For changing material it is mm02, and
press continue. We'll do this one more time for create material. We'll right click on favorites, choose
insert transaction, and enter mm01 for create material and press continue. To answer any of these
transactions we have now favored it. We can simply click on the line of the transaction we want.
Next, let's look at deleting favorites. If we want to delete any of these transactions from our
favorites, we right click on the favorite we want to delete. We'll right click on mm01 and choose
delete favorites. SAP gives us an information message at the bottom telling us that the note was
deleted from our favorites list. Perhaps we want to share our favorites with a colleague because we
have a similar role and use similar transactions in SAP. We can do this by clicking More, Favorites,
Download to PC. We need to enter the file name, we'll enter SAP favorites and click save. This object
with all of our favorites is now saved on the local PC. To demonstrate that our download and upload
works, we'll quickly delete our remaining favorites. We'll right click mm02 and choose delete
favorites. And we'll do the same with mm03. We'll right click and choose delete favorites. Now to
upload our favorites, we'll go to More, Favorites, Upload from PC. We'll choose SAP favorites and
click open. Now we see our lder includes mm02 and mm03, Change Material and Display Material.
We have now added, deleted and downloaded and uploaded our favorites on the SAP Easy Access
screen.
Icons and buttons in SAP ERP

- [Instructor] There are some common icons, buttons and system messages that we encounter often
when we're working in SAP. Let's take a look at a few. To demonstrate, we'll enter into a transaction
to change a material. The T code for this is MM02. We have two fields available in this transaction,
material and change number. The red asterisk next to the material field means that it's a required
field. If we try to continue without entering a valid material, we will hit a hard stop. To demonstrate,
we'll leave the material field empty and click continue. This brings up a red error message in the
footer bar. We can go no further until we fill out all required entry fields. We'll enter material FG
dash MAT dash zero one and press continue. This brings up a list of views to select. Each view has a
checkbox next to it. Check boxes are used when the system allows multiple choices. We can choose
as many views as we like here. Checkbox screens also include select all and de-select all buttons.
We'll select all our views and de-select all our views. For our demonstration, we'll select basic data
one and basic data two. The green check mark is the continue button. Anytime we see this button,
we can click it or we can press enter on our keyboard. That brings us to our change material. In our
description field, we see this material is called small widgets. This transaction and many other
transactions use tabs. Tabs separate the information in a transaction where there are many fields. To
navigate between the tabs, we can click on the tab itself. We'll click basic data two now. Or we can
click the ellipsis, the three dots. This will bring up all available tabs. Then we can choose our tab from
this dropdown menu. We'll click on plant stock tab. This brings up a dialog box. Dialogue box is asked
for more information before we can proceed. We'll enter plant 1710 and press continue. Let's make
a simple change to this material. We'll change the description from small widgets to small widgets
red. And we'll click save to save our changes. We now get a green success message that our material
has been saved successfully. We've seen the red error message and the green success message.
There's a third information message that's important. It is the yellow message. We're going to hop
over to a different transaction to demonstrate this. We're now in the create sales order transaction.
We've pre-populated some information to demonstrate the warning message. We'll now try to save
the sales order by clicking save. We'll choose a sales area for customer and click continue. Now we
get our yellow warning message. The yellow warning message here is basically saying, there
probably should be some more information. It should include the customer's purchase order
number and the customer's reference date. However, these fields don't have a red asterisk. They're
not required by the system, so we could press enter and continue on in our transaction. There are
many common icons, buttons and system messages in SAP. After spending some time in different
transactions, end users get very familiar with all of their functions.
Multiple SAP sessions

- [Instructor] Oftentimes, we're going to want to do multiple things in SAP at once. Now, we're going
to look at how to use multiple sessions and navigate from within transactions in the SAP GUI. We can
have up to six sessions open at one time. To open a new session, we go to the three lines in the top
left corner, click and select new GUI window from the dropdown menu. We can now see that we
have two SAP, easy access screens available meaning we have two SAP sessions open. Once we're in
a transaction, transaction code navigation changes a little bit. We're going to enter into display a
sales order with transaction code va03. Maybe we realized what we need to do instead is display a
purchase order. The T code for displaying a purchase order is me23n. We'll try to enter that T code
directly in our command field without going back to the SAP easy access screen and press enter. The
system gives us a red error message telling us we must fill out all our required fields first. There are
two important codes to remember in this situation. The first is /n as in November. We must type
forward slash and n and then the T code immediately after. So we type /n then the T code me23n
and press enter. Now, we're taken into the display purchase order transaction. The other important
code to remember is used to open a new session in a new transaction. This code is /o as in Oscar. So
if we want to display a purchase order in one session, and we want to open another session where
we're displaying a sales order, we can type /ova03. We now have multiple SAP sessions with
different transactions open in each of them. Remember, /n navigates to a new transaction in the
same session and /o opens a new transaction in a new session.
Searching for data and using wildcards

- [Instructor] To use SAP effectively, we must find the data we want to work with. Whether it's a
customer number or a material number, it's impossible to have it all memorized. Any editable fields
in the SAP gooey that are not freeform text fields allow us to search for the data we need. To
demonstrate, let's enter and display a material transaction using the code mm03. We need to
display a material but let's imagine, we don't know the material number we need. When we click on
the material field, the match code button appears. Anytime the match code button shows up in SAP,
we can search. We'll click the match code button now; this opens our search screen. The search
screen allows us to search using a large variety of data combinations. By clicking the three dots on
the right side of this screen, we can see all the tabs with the possible search combinations. Let's
assume that we know the material we're searching for has a description called, forklift. So, we'll
search by material number/material description. Now in our material description field we'll enter
forklift and press, Start Search. Our search returned one exact match which has material CM-FL-V00.
We'll click this and press Copy. We now have this material number entered our material field.
Sometimes we will only have partial information for our searches. Wild cards allow a search when
we only have some information. The search wild card in SAP is the asterisk. As an example, what if
we know we're searching for material that has forklift somewhere in the description but it's not an
exact match. To demonstrate it, we'll delete this material and again, we'll press the magical button.
This time in our material description, we'll use our asterisk wildcard, type forklift and type, asterisk
again. This search is telling the system that anything can come before or after the word forklift, but
the search should return all those results for us. We'll now press Start Search. We now see that we
have 11 materials that have the word forklift in the material description field. We can use wildcards
in any searchable fields in SAP. Wildcards make searching in SAP much easier and more accurate.
Even when we only have partial information available.
Printing in SAP

Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video

- [Instructor] Setting up the default printer in SAP is really helpful to get physical outputs from our
system, and it's one of the first things to do when working in a new SAP system. Let's set up our
default printer now. To do this, we'll go to More, System, User Data. This opens our Maintain User
Profile screen. From here, we'll click the Defaults tab. Now, under Spool Control, we need to set up
our default printer in the output device field. To do this, we'll click in there and choose the match
code button. We'll leave all our fields blank and choose Start Search. Our search returned three
possible default printers. At larger organizations, this list can be massive. We'll choose LP01 and
select Copy. We'll also check the Print Now box. If left unselected, the system retains printing
requests in the spool system until they are released for printing all at once. We'll also check the
Delete After Output box. This indicates whether lists are to be deleted immediately after printing,
otherwise, if left unchecked, what has been requested to be printed stays in the spool system until
an expiration date. Now we can Save. We see we get a success message that our user ID, student
001, has changed. It's important to note that our default printer will not take effect until we log off
and log back onto the system. To do this we'll press Exit and confirm Yes, we do want to log off. Now
we can log back on. We'll enter client, username, student 001, and password, and press Enter. Our
default printer is now set. To demonstrate printing, we'll enter VA05 and press Enter. This is our list
of sales orders reports. We're going to run this without any selection criteria by pressing Execute.
Now on most report results screens, we'll see our print icon, which is in our top right next to the Exit
button. When we click this, we'll be able to print a physical copy to the default printer we just set up.
Setting up our default printer and printing can be crucial when we need a physical copy of important
system information.