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Saved Searches Are Your New Best Friend

Recently I wrote about how I thought our Tags were being neglected when compared to their SuperTag siblings. That got me to thinking about another very powerful and useful feature in BatchBook that I don’t think gets the attention it deserves.

Our lists and reports are great for collecting and preparing your data for exporting and printing. You can choose fields you want to appear and customize them in many ways. They are really powerful and are even auto-updating so that they will always reflect the most current information in your account.

But before a list is a list – it’s just a search. You enter in your criteria and pull up your results. At this point you are given a choice – save your search or create list.

BatchBook - Save Search

Most folks seem to opt for the list at this stage, and really who can blame them. They are fancy and useful and all and I like my lists – but I love my saved searches. You see, saved searches offer some benefits that lists and reports just can’t match.

Easy Access: Your saved searches show up just under your advanced search bar which is accessible from any page. This makes them really convenient to get access to.

BatchBook Saved Searches

List templates: Do you have a common list that you use a lot that you are always needing to recreate or duplicate? Create the base search and save it . You can then make any minor tweaks you need to and turn it in to a new list any time you need it.

Use Batch Actions: We love our batch actions, the ability to perform functions like tagging, merging, and SuperTag data updating on multiple records at one time. Batch actions aren’t available on lists – but they are available for the results of your saved searches.

For me my lists tend to be one offs, things I pull together for a single use. A mailing for a specific event or a call list. I use them and then they get deleted. For the information that I look at on a day to day basis, saved searches provide me with even more benefits – and if I need a list or a report with the extra functionality that they bring, I can always create them from my search.

How do you use Saved Searches?

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How-To: Give BatchBook Web Forms your own look and feel

Web Forms have been a very popular feature among BatchBook users. Turns out, people love being able to let their web site visitors do their own contact data entry! :)

Through the BatchBook forums and email support, we’ve received a lot of great recommendations for feature enhancements. Among those requests was the ability to style the web form in a way that will fit your web site’s look and feel a bit better. As Sean pointed out on the thread, that’s actually doable right now with a bit of html wizardry. So, let’s do it!

Step 1: Create your form & grab the raw HTML

For this example, I’m going to replace the embedded contact form on my own website with the raw web form code. The first thing we need is a web form to grab the raw code from. (more…)

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Our Users Are So Smart: The List View Dashboard Widget

Last week, I posted about our recent flurry of updates to BatchBook. After a weekend to play with some of the new changes, there’s one I really love. It’s the List widget on the Dashboard.

And we love to give props where props are due. So, yet again, that was a recommendation that came from the forums. In this case, forum user Barbara Ballard asked:

Inspired by the Marketing dashboard widget … I created “Barbara’s list”. It’s all current clients, alumni, leads, projects assigned to me. It’s who I should be thinking about this week, who I should pay attention to. … Now I want it on my dashboard.

We had been talking about doing a saved search widget. But when Barbara recommended putting Lists on the Dashboard, an bell went off in my head. First of all, Lists are already part of BatchBook. This would put something on the Dashboard that just about everybody is already using in their account. Nothing new to learn. Instant gratification. Secondly, a saved search is best handled as a list anyway. That way it will always update, always be accessible, always be exportable, etc.

It was the perfect solution.

Thank you, Barbara, for your excellent recommendation!

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