Using Sticky Notes

Let’s take a look at how to use StickyNotes on records in the system.  First we need to open a record we will create a note for.  To do this let’s go to Lists, then Relationships, and click Customers.  Since we setup StickyNotes to work on customers, it would work on any of these, but I’ll just pick this first, Colorado Rockies, customer.  When the customer information loads, the first thing we notice is this popup tutorial.  We have the option to close it, and we could click this, Don’t show again, checkbox before we did, if we didn’t want this to popup again.

Now, I’m not usually one to use these types of tutorials.  I often find they cover information that is obvious anyway, however this one’s a little different.  It’s really good, and I recommend you take a moment to go through it.  We’ll go ahead and breeze through the screens by clicking Launch Tutorial.  As each new screen comes up, we’ll simply click next to go through it.  Of course normally, we would read through all of these, however since we will cover most of what’s here in this, and the next video, we’ll just go through them rather quickly.  Eventually, we get to the End of the Tutorial, where we can click close and could start using StickyNotes.

To create a note, we click on any of these three red, yellow, or green buttons, here at the top.  They create high, medium, and low priority ones.  Let’s create a medium priority one.  We start by typing in a message.  Here, I’ll type in: “Anne Sullivan has some special promotions going on with this customer, please refer any communication from the Rockies to her.”  This way, anyone who brings up this customer will know that they should contact Anne, if they are working with them.  If we saved this right now, which we could do by clicking Save, this would be private and only we could see it, and that’s not really what we want.  We could go up here and address this to Anne.  You’ll see as I type her name in, the system searches for anyone named Anne, and we can select her from the drop down list.  The problem is, now this will only be visible to us, and Anne, since that is who we addressed this to.  Of course we could add everyone we wanted, by typing their names as well, but that’s a lot of work.  Instead let’s remove her by clicking this red x, and place a check in the public checkbox over here.  This makes the note public, and now everyone who visits this customer will see it.  Clicking save saves it back to NetSuite, and we see it on the record.  This unlocked icon lets us know it’s public.  If it were private, this would be a lock icon.

Through the magic of video editing, I am going to quickly create a few more notes.  For each one we have an action menu, that contains a number of actions we can perform.  So if Anne had already called this customer, as requested, she could hover over the actions menu, and mark it as done.  This way, anyone else seeing this would know she had contacted them.  We can also create a reply, and they are attached to the notes they are created from.  We can create as many replies as we want, and you’ll notice they are kept in order, with the last one showing up on top.  When we have more than one reply, we have an option to expand them, if they are collapsed.  This allows us to view all of them, however we may have to scroll down to do so.  The expand option changes to a compile option, and we can collapse the replies back into a stack.

If we are the owner of the note, then we can delete it, by selecting that from the menu.  We get a popup confirming that we really want to delete it, and when we click yes, it goes away.  This is now deleted from the system, and there is no way to get it back.  Unless our administrator has setup some type of logging or backup, it really is gone.  Additionally if you delete a note that has replies, the replies will also be deleted.  If you are done with a note, but don’t really want to delete it, maybe you just want it to be removed from the screen, you can archive it.  We can do that by selecting archive, which is just underneath delete.  We get a similar popup, but unlike deleted notes, archived, as their name implies, still exist in the system.  They are typically viewed through the StickyNotes board, which we will cover in a different video.  While you can’t directly unarchive a note, it can be done by an administrator through the custom records for the bundle.  It’s also worth mentioning that only the owner, the person who created the note, can archive or delete it, at least through the interface anyway.  Of course an administrator could go into the custom records that are used for this bundle, and delete or archive a note as well.  But through the interface, only the owner can perform those actions.

As we were looking at the options menu, there may have been one choice that is surprisingly missing.  That’s the lack of an edit option.  Notes, as well as their replies, are not editable, once you have clicked save, when creating them initially.  To be clear, you also can’t click in the text of a note to edit it either.  They are designed to be non-editable.

For replies, there isn’t even an actions menu, since the only thing you can do is delete them.  Deleting a reply doesn’t delete the replies underneath it though, unlike deleting a note, which does.  We can see this by first expanding the replies on this note.  Now we can see the trash can icon here, if we hover over the upper right hand corner.  The other reply would have also had this, if we hovered over its corner.  Let’s click delete, and click yes to the confirmation dialog box.  This reply goes away, and the other one slides up to take its place.

If there are times when we don’t want to see all these notes.  For example if we didn’t want to see any of the high priority ones.  We can hover over the menu, and select or deselect what we do, or don’t, want to see.  We can hide all the normal priority ones if we want to.  Because we don’t have any low priority, we only see this high priority one we have.  Let’s change this back, so we can see all of them.

As we’ve been looking at the notes, especially since we have a few of them, it might have become apparent, that it’s kind of difficult to see the data, for the record they are attached to.  The record kind of falls into the background.  We can drag and drop, and move the notes around if we want to, so we can see all of the information in the background.  But there’s a better way to see all the data back here.  If we click the StickyNotes menu again, we can choose this Hide Notes option.  This hides all the notes we have on screen.  If we refresh this page, you’ll see everything is still hidden.  To make sure we don’t miss anything, there is a popup dialog box, that let’s us know there are notes here.  It also tells us how we can show them.  I’ll click close to this notice.  Whether you show or hide these is an individual user setting, rather than a record setting.  So as a user, if I went to a different record, the notes on that record would also be hidden.  Of course I would also get a popup on the other record, to tell me there were hidden notes there as well.  If another user came to this record, the notes would not be hidden automatically for them.

When we first started looking at notes, we had a tutorial that came up.  We can bring that tutorial back, by clicking on help, a little further down on our menu.  Earlier, I wanted us to at least see the screens as we clicked through.  If I don’t want to see this tutorial anymore, I can click this “don’t show again” checkbox, and acknowledge the popup.  Now, after I click close, this tutorial won’t come up anymore, when I open this, or other records.

If you really like StickyNotes, or otherwise find it useful, and want to say thank you to the developers, you can click Rate Us.  In the menu that comes up, you can type in a message and send it.  You can also let them know you think they are doing well, by giving them a star rating.  I want to caution, that this is not the correct place to look for support.  That should either be done through your administrator or through your support channels.  I’m going to click cancel for now since I have already sent in feedback about this bundle anyway.

We saw earlier, that you can move notes around, and they maintain their position relative to the record.  If you place one in the middle of the record, other users will see it in roughly the  same spot.  This brings up an interesting question though.  What if you drag a note off the screen?  You can see here, that we can do just that.  The only way we really know they are there, is to scroll over, to the right in this case.  We get a hint that we can scroll to the right, by the horizontal scroll bar below.  The note also maintains its position when we come back to this customer, or when other users load the record.  This could be either good or bad, depending on how it is used.  I just want you to be aware of the behavior.

StickyNotes are available on existing records, but not new ones.  We can see that, if we go to Actions, and select New.  The area up here, where our menus were located before, are missing.  This has to do with how the software works.  But really, if you need a note on a new record, just save the record and then add it.  I’ll click the back button to take us back to our Colorado Rockies customer again.  You can see the note we placed over here to the right is just where we left it.  Let’s move that back.

You can add a note in either view, or edit, mode.  In fact we have been adding all of these in view mode.  This means that you don’t need to save an existing record, nor do you need to have edit access to it, in order to leave a note.  So you can probably imagine some situations, where this could be useful for employees who, maybe can’t, or shouldn’t, be able to edit a record, but can still leave notes about it.

One last thing worth mentioning, is that notes don’t have a live update capability.  If you are in a record, and someone else adds a note, you won’t see it until you reload the record.  The same is true if someone marks one as done, deletes or archives it, moves it around or does something else similar.

Even though we have covered a lot, there is more to talk about.  We’ve taken a look at some of the basics of how to use Sticky Notes, in the next video we will explore them a little more in depth.