The Taskbar is an incredibly handy feature in GoldMine. And, because I find a lot of organizations and users are either not aware of or are not using it, I should begin with a brief explanation of the GoldMine Taskbar.
On a tangent note, it never ceases to amaze me how many fantastic features in GoldMine people don’t know about it! Don’t get me started on why I believe this is the case. But, one of the reasons I take the time to write this GoldMine Success Newsletter is to expose users to the possibilities their software has to help them sell more, market better, and manage smarter. Now back to this issue’s Tech Tip …
The GoldMine Taskbar is a navigational tool – meaning it is used to get around the application. The Taskbar gives you a handy and quick way to:
1) Go to places in GoldMine (menu items)
2) Launch web sites,
3) Open documents (Word, Excel, PDF, Images, or any other kind of file)
4) Launch other software applications
5) Trigger a GoldMine Macro.
The GoldMine Taskbar is nothing until you customize it. In other words, out-of-the-box there’s nothing useful about it, however, once it is personalized, either for all your users or just your own individual Taskbar, it becomes a power tool that will save you time & effort throughout your day. (Learn more – First Direct has a webinar on how to be more productive by using GoldMine’s Taskbar.)
If you’ve been using the Taskbar you probably have already added a document to it. It’s a cinch – just a right click “add item,” choose “document link,” and then browse out to find and “open” the specific file you want to link. But, if you’ve ever tried to add a whole “file folder” containing the paths to any number of files, you would have found out that you can not select a folder. Or so you thought!
The way to link a folder is so easy it made me chuckle when it occurred to me how simple it is. Just add a “website” link and instead of typing a URL, type a file location. It will look like this file:/// followed by the drive letter and file path. That’s it! Then you’ll have a GoldMine Taskbar entry which will open your identified folder so you can then select any file you want.
This is great for creating handy links to folders with too many items to put individually on your taskbar. Some examples I’ve come across for this include folders with product literature, graphics, price lists, project information, etc.
