The release of the new Dashboard went amazingly well last week. We got a lot of great comments from you guys and there's a lot of excitement about it.
One of the things many people really loved was the new Search bar. Most of it's functionality is pretty obvious, but there are a six things about it that may not be that obvious, but are really helpful.
- Legal first name
- Comma after last name
- Partial last, partial first name
- Date of birth
- Colorful results
- Great for mobile
Legal first name. Whatever the system interprets as a first name is searched for in both First Name and Legal First Name member attribute fields. (We also added this to the search field in contribution data entry - great for avoiding duplicates.)
Often data from other systems have fields for both Familiar/ Goes By and Formal /Legal first names. We import Familiar/Goes By into our First Name fixed attribute field. Formal/Legal is imported as a custom attribute. With the Dashboard release we've added Legal First Name as a reserved custom attribute for importing future data. If you have a similar field, review and edit it so that it is labelled Legal First Name. That way Search can find James even if he's listed in the database as Jim.
Comma after last name. Any time you add a comma after a name, the system will recognize it as a last name.
Partial last, partial first name. If you can't read someone's writing on a card you can put in as many letters as you recognize for a last name then a comma and as many letters as you can read for a first name.
Date of birth. Enter in a date in any format to see everyone in the database with that as their birthdate.
Colorful results. After you click Go to see the results of your search, blue results are people, green results are goups and red results are reports.
Great for mobile. This was the first thing one of our Sr. Pastors recognized about the Dashboard last week. Rather than clicking around, he could just search for any name, group or report as soon as he logged in.
If you haven't worked with the Dashboard yet, login on both mobile and laptop and start clicking around. There's all sorts of cool things tucked away in the four cards and Text-to-Church bar. So much so that I've made the Dashboard the outline for a new, revised Meet The Software webinar.
