Sticky Notes Board

The StickyNotes Board, allows you to view all the notes you can see, in one convenient place, let’s take a look. We get to it by going to Lists, then Productivity, which is probably a new option for most of you. Then we click on the StickyNotes Board option. The board then goes out and finds all the notes you have access to, so if you have a lot, it may take a moment to open. Since this is our first time here, we’re greeted by a tutorial. This tutorial is different than the one that pops up on records, and like that one, I would encourage you to go through this one as well. We could simply close this, or select to not show it again, however we’ll step through it quickly by clicking Launch Tutorial. We’ll click Next Topic to all of these popups. You can see that they come up next to, and highlight, the area they pertain to. Once we’re at the end, we’ll click close. We are going to cover and demonstrate most of what is in the tutorial anyway. The screen is basically broken down into three sections. This area to the left, contains filtering information, so we can choose which notes to display, and which ones not to. This area at the top, allows us to view our notes in a different format, sort them however we want, and even save them to our own computer as a CSV file. Starting here at the left, we have a free form search field. Let’s type in Rockies, and the search starts before we are even done typing. We only have one note that shows up, and this may not have been what you were expecting. Let’s go ahead and delete this. Here we see that there are at least two notes we would expect to show up, but we only saw one, and it wasn’t either of these. This brings up an important point. This search, only searches through the text of the note. Below this, we can filter by priority. If we only want to see our high priority notes, we can de-select the normal and low priority ones. This is more helpful if we have changed the sorting order, which we will talk about in a moment. Let’s go ahead and re-select these two. We can use these date fields, to type in a from, and to date, or we can use the calendar modal to do this by clicking on its icon. These aren’t labeled, but the from, or earlier date, is the top selection and the to, or later date, is the bottom selection. You also don’t have to enter both of these dates either. If you enter just a from date in the top, you will be searching from that date until the current date. Similarly if you enter just a to date in the bottom, you will be searching everything up until that date. Down here, we can uncheck any of the record types we don’t want to show. So if we didn’t want to see the notes that were attached to customer records, we could uncheck customer here on the left, and they go away. We can check this again, and they return. Over here to the right, as our popup tool tip is pointing out, the total number of any specific types are listed. These popup tool tips are embedded throughout this piece of software. The developers have done a really good job of providing the right information, at the right time with them. So far we’ve been looking at these in their square form. There is an option to view them as a list, by clicking this list view icon up here. Depending on how you like to work, this may make it easier on you. However, I prefer the other view, so I’ll change it back to that. It’s also worth mentioning, even though we only see eight notes on the screen, there are more that we can scroll down to. If we want to export our notes, we can do that by clicking the Save as CSV button up here. This exports them in a format that can be read by most spreadsheet and text editing software. For me this opens in Excel. Each note has been exported as a row of data. Each column represents a distinct field. You may have to expand some of the columns to see all the data, such as with this one, for Created Time. Let’s go ahead and close this. Excel is asking me if I want to save this file, because I changed the size of the Created Time field, however, if I had changed any data it would also ask me this. Even if I had made some changes, and saved the file, those changes would not be sent back to NetSuite. Once this file is downloaded, it is no longer attached to NetSuite in any way. So don’t make changes here, and think they are going to be reflected in the system, because they won’t. We can choose how we want our notes sorted using the sort by columns here. If we click on one of these options, we will change the sorting order from ascending to descending, or vice versa. Right now this is sorted with high priority notes at the top. If we click it, those with a low priority are at the top. Click it again, and the high priority ones return to the top. If I want to sort this by another field, say Record Type for example, I can drag that field to the left. Now, these are sorted by record type. Notes are sorted by these fields, from left to right. So ours are sorted as follows. Alphabetically, by record type first. Then by priority from highest to lowest. Followed by date and time created, with the newest ones showing up above older ones. Lastly they are sorted by owner, or who created them. Because each of these were created on a record, it makes sense that we might want to see the record they are attached to. We can click on the record link field below the To field, in order to open the record. What’s really nice, is when we do this, the record automatically opens in a new tab or window. We don’t have to hold down the ctrl key or anything, this behavior happens automatically, so we don’t lose our place in the board. We are also automatically switched to the new tab. Here we can see the Colorado Rockies customer where we created this note earlier. I’ll go ahead and close this tab, and we are back on the notes board. The one we clicked on a moment ago is now in the center of the screen, because we clicked it. But clicking anywhere else will put it back down with the rest. In the notes themselves, we see information such as the date they were created, who they are to, what record they are attached to, the text of the note, and a signature of the person who created them. Under that, we see icons that have semantic meaning. The lock icon means it’s private, whereas an unlocked icon means it’s public. The paperclip icon means there is an attachment, and the text bubble icon, all the way to the right, means there are replies to it . We could see each note in more detail by clicking it, which brings it to the foreground temporarily. For this one we also see its reply. For really long notes, those with a lot of text, not all of the text will show in the normal view. For these, you can also click the note to read the rest of the text, though you may have to scroll to do so. As we were changing each of these options, in the filter and sort criteria sections, you probably noticed that the changes take effect immediately. There is no refresh for this screen as there are for many other screens in the system. Additionally, the sort by settings are sticky, so once you get your sort order setup, it will stay the way you like it. The filter criteria however, are not sticky, but from how I have seen this used, it usually makes sense to have it this way. The last thing that I want to bring up, is that in the help documentation, it mentions that you will only see the first hundred notes on the board. In my experimentation, and I created well over a hundred, I did not find this to be accurate. There may still be some upper boundary though, so you should at least be aware of it. Now you have a good idea of how to use Sticky Notes. Hopefully you will be able to use them to improve your daily workflow, communication and efficiency.