This FAQ document is divided
into three sections: General Usability, Customization and Planned Features, and Setup
and Customization. The audiences of the sections are respectively, the end user, the
management of your organization, and the power user/consultant. This document will
change often in response to your feedback!
General Usability Questions
Q1: How do I open up the user
manual from wihin ODB?
Click on the Question Mark (help) icon, choose
Help and Documentation... and then click on the Open User Guide button.
Q2: How do I view all the
records in my database?
Using the right-mouse button, click on the
Select Records... button. You will see a popup menu that allows you to select all
records. Please note that at this time the ODB program only performs searches on one
table at a time. So you can select all the people, or you can select all the
organizations. For this reason, many groups using the pre-1.0 version of ODB are
entering all their information into the people table, and they plan to run some
automated conversion utilities to move organizational information to the Groups
section once 1.0 is available.
Q3: How do I handle addresses
where there are two people within a household in ODB?
The easiest thing to
do is to put your primary contact in the first name and last name fields, and
to put the other contact you have in that household on the second line of the
address (line2). By doing this it becomes easier to produce mailing labels, since
it is tough to fit the names of couples on one line if each partner keeps their
original surname. We also added the titles (Mr., Ms., etc.) and suffixes (Jr., III, etc.)
but for grassroots organizing groups we have found that the overhead of maintaining
the titles and suffixes information and incorporating that into mail merges for formal
invitations is not the most important priority. It is also possible to use Mr. & Mrs.
if surname is the same.
Q4: OK, I have entered some
couples in the database where the surnames are different. But now when I enter
a last name into the search box, I can't find the people who have their names
on Line2.
If you right-click on the search box, you will notice a menu
choice that allows you to search both lines of the address. For example, if you type
"Jones" into the search box and then use this menu choice, you will find every one
with "Jones" in the lastname or on Line2. You can also use this feature to search
for organizations. I.E., you can type the word "Union" and find all the entries in
the People table (if the People button is chosen) that have some kind of union
listed as their place of employment in the second line of their address.
Q5: I have a signup sheet
to enter. Is there a way to make it easier to include a comment about the event
people signed up at as part of each new record?
Yes; ODB has a "repeated
comments" feature for this purpose. Once you enter the first record, you can
select that record and right-click on the "New Record" button. Then choose
"Add with repeated comment from selected record." On subsequent records, you
can choose "Add with last repeated comment" from this menu.
Q6: Is there a "mass update"
feature?
Not yet; however there is a "mass delete" feature. We will provide
a "mass update" before 9/3/2003. Both features will also be password protected to
prevent inadvertent use.
Q7: I used the "Copy
Emails" button to copy 50 emails to the clipboard so that I could send an email
to 50 people. But my Microsoft Outlook 98 software does not accept a list of
addresses separated by commas. Outlook requires semicolons. Will ODB support
Outlook?
ODB already does. If you right-click on the copy emails button,
you will notice many different options for copying the email list, including; the
one-email-per-line format required by email-list software and a columnar
format for generating phone lists, as well as the Outlook-compatible format.
Q8: How can I perform a query
on donation and contact data simultaneously? e.g.: Find the email addresses of all
volunteers who've made a donation in the past month or Find the donation history of
everyone with interest in a specific issue.
If you do a donation query and check
the "View Custom Query" box, you will notice that it is possible to "Add SQL to broaden
your search" or "Add SQL to further restrict your search". Assuming you wanted to find
people with activity code "V1-Volunteer" and issue code "T1-Toxics" you would put:
activit like "*V1*" and issues like "*T1*"
in "Add SQL to further restrict your search" box
and click the search button. This is actually easy, because the SQL here can be generated
by ODB if you do a simple "people" search, view the SQL, copy it, switch to "donations",
and then paste the SQL in the "Add SQL to further restrict your search" box.
Q9: Can I print a thank you
note in ODB?
Yes, after you search for the people you want to send thank you
notes to, you can click Print button and choose Thank You Note as the printing format.
Q10: How can I delete a payment?
You can always do that by press the delete key on your keyboard once the payment
is selected. You also can edit the payment if you double click on it and change the amount,
category, etc.
Q11: How can I check the current
version of ODB?
You can check it by clicking on the question mark icon and choose
About ODB. It will show the current version of your ODB.
Q12: How can I check the location of
database?
You can do it by clicking on the wrench icon and select Detach Current
Database. It will show where the database is located.
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