- Your Treasure Trove: Storing Contact Information
- Finding a Contact Record
- Improving a Browse List
Improving a Browse List
Click a field and display the lookup table by pressing F2. The Entry dialog box appears, headed by the name of that field. Select New or Edit when you have highlighted an item to be changed.
Type or edit the characters for the entry, and click OK when you're done.
Set Up Your Pop-ups
You can arrange for a particular field to pop up the Browse List window when you click in the space where the field window will appear. Click Setup in the Browse List window to adjust your lookup possibilities, field by field.
Putting More Than One Entry in a Field
You can place more than one value in a single field of a record, if you have created suitable entries in the lookup table.
A standard entry that ends with a semicolon (;) will be added to whatever is already in the field, and separated by a comma. The semicolon is not shown in the browse list.
A standard entry that ends with a percentage sign (%) will be placed in front of whatever is already in the field. Leave a space in front of the % if you want the entries to be separated.
Unpunctuated Lookups Overwrite
Selecting a lookup entry that does not have a semicolon or percentage sign will overwrite any existing field entry.
Not all users are allowed to amend the F2 lookup setup. For instance, it might not be a good idea to let users enter text of their own composition and spelling! Chapter 14, "Round Up a Posse: Building a Sales Team," shows how the supervisor with Master rights can control which users are allowed to create new lookup entries.
Attaching Descriptions and Explanations
When you first come to a menu, it might not be immediately obvious what each item means. You can attach a description or explanation to each entry by editing the entry to include two forward slash marks (//). These will not appear in the record, nor will any text that follows them.
Using Zip Codes
The zip code of the contact's address can be configured in various ways. For instance, you can configure GoldMine to expedite an address entry by filling in city and state information from a zip code entry in the browse list.
If you type a zip code that has not been previously recorded in GoldMine, the Zip Code Profile dialog box appears. Here you can record information about the zip code so that it can be used in the browse list procedure.
Getting Around Your Tabs
GoldMine is delivered with a standard set of tabs that holds various data fields that belong to the contact record. Each tab has a title that is visible and you can click on this title to bring the fields to the top of the tab display. Some partial tabs might be visible. They give access to further tabs.
Your GoldMine implementation might have some extra tabs that have been installed as an industry template, or were created by a user with Master rights.
You can also view the standard tabs by pressing Ctrl+ the initial letter of the tab name. After you have selected one tab you can move to another by using the left and right arrow keys.
Some of the tabs contain fields that are controlled directly by GoldMine. You can't enter data into these fields; they'll appear grayed out. The rest of the fields are available for contact data.
Editing Contact Record Properties
The Edit menu also includes commands to access contact record properties and details.
Look After Your Properties
Properties refer to the various details associated with a GoldMine object. Just as in many software systems, a GoldMine property is an attribute of a field, record, or file that has been assigned one or more values, which might be numeric or alphabetic.
The Record Properties option displays a dialog box with three tabs:
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Phone Formatting allows you to choose between USA and non-USA phone number formats for the currently active record.
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Ownership lets you assign ownership of this record to specific users and arrange for some of the fields to be "curtained" so that some users cannot see their values.
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Alerts offers a dialog box to create or activate alerts, which are Record Alert messages that will appear on any user's workspace if this contact record becomes active there. The user is obliged to acknowledge a Record Alert—the user will have studied the reason why the alert has been activated. The alert name will appear in the Previous Result field of the Summary tab.
You can freely create alerts and then choose which ones to attach to your currently active record. Details of new alerts are automatically stored in the What's New? tab at the InfoCenter. You can transfer any alert to the KnowledgeBase if it is to be a permanent part of your working method.
A particular alert can be attached to a contact record, but no Record Alert message will appear unless the Enable Alerts check box has been ticked. The list will be grayed if the alerts are not enabled.
The Record Details menu offers a drop-down list of all the tabs in the current database. The standard tabs are shown in Figure 3.5. A tab is a collection of fields that have been grouped for a particular purpose. For instance, if you click the Notes tab, you will see a display of any notes that users have attached to the current contact record. If you cannot see the tab you require, try clicking one of the tab fragments at the right of the labeled tabs—this might reveal what you seek.
Figure 3.5 Go immediately to any tab in the current contact record.
Some fields in some of the tabs are updated automatically by GoldMine and might not be edited by users. Subsequent chapters discuss how working with the various functions will leave entries on the different tabs.
The Least You Need to Know
The File submenu item is mainly about databases.
The Edit submenu is mainly about contact records.
Contact records can usually be given sensible data by using the F2 lookup routine.
GoldMine usually looks after itself and your contact records—no matter what you try to do.