The Open Dental Support Team has been growing and expanding our knowledge for years. We love what we do and we love our customers. In this post, we’re sharing some of the most common questions our Support Team answers.

Is there an update available?

Unless you updated in the past week, the answer is probably YES! But do you need to update weekly? Probably not but you’re welcome to.

Our Engineering Team releases 3-4 major updates a year, and a minor release (new “Builds”) almost weekly.  Major releases introduce new features and major enhancements. New Builds resolve minor annoyances and bugs.

To see if an update is available for you, go to Help > Update.
For help updating, watch our QuickTip video: How to Update Open Dental to a New Version.

TECH TIP: Want to know what’s been added to the software since your last update? Our Version-Release Feature Highlights posts give you the main changes in each version. If you’d like to see a complete list of EVERYTHING released in each version, check out the Versions page in our manual.

What do I do when I get an Unhandled Exception?

This is an error message and we’ll need to help – please call us.

I got an error – how do I fix it?

You are always welcome to call for support, but most error messages in Open Dental include information on what’s needed to resolve them. Permission errors will tell you which permission is needed to take that action, missing data errors will tell you what is missing, etc.

I want to offer a membership plan to my patients. Do I need to use third-party software for this?

Nope! You can create and manage these plans right in Open Dental. Take a look at our post on Helping Patients Afford the Care They Need which reviews membership plans and discount plans. If you would like help setting this up, please reach out, we’re here for you!

I want to see how many of each procedure was performed in my practice last year. How do I do this?

Go to Reports > Standard. In the Daily section on the left is the Procedures Report. Run it for the date range you want, and select Grouped by Procedure Code. If you want to see how many of a specific procedure code you did in that timeframe, simply enter the code in the box ‘Only for procedure codes similar to’.

No matter what your Open Dental-related question might be, our Support Team is happy to help. For quick questions, try online chat. If you need us to remote into your computer, please give us a call.