NetChecklist.com Copying Checklists Video

This video explains how to copy checklists in the web application NetChecklist.com.

Video Transcript - Using checklists by copying them the Task Management Application NetChecklist.com

Hi, welcome to another video tutorial on the web application NetChecklist.com. In this video I'm going to talk about how to use checklists by copying them in the application.

Again I've logged in as a fictitious user named Bob Broker who is the manager of a fictitious Real Estate company called Ready Real Estate and we're on Bob's home page for this organization.

The way you use a checklist in this application is by copying it to the actual task list. Remember that items on a checklist are not on the actual task list. A checklist is like a blank form that you can use over and over again by making copies of it. The benefit of this is that you can develop and refine your checklists over time and then each time you use a checklist all of the items from it automatically gets added to the task list for you so nothing gets forgotten and there's no typing required.

You make copies of checklists on the "Copy Checklist to Task List" page and there are actually several ways you can get to this page. The first way you can get to this page is by going up to the "Checklists" button on the main menu and clicking the down arrow button just to the right of it and then going down to the item that says "Copy Checklist to Task List".

When you get to this page, the first thing you select is the name of the checklist that you want to make a copy of - we obviously have to know that. And next, you select the name of the project you want to copy the checklist to the task list for. In this application, every item on the task list must be assigned to a project so you must select a project to copy the task list for. Remember the point of creating checklists is to be able to use them over and over again for the different projects you're working on so it makes sense that each time you copy a checklist, you have to specify the project that you're copying it for. If the project doesn't exist yet, you will need to create the project first and then come back to this page. Now, there are two more fields on this form but before we cover those, let's look at the other two ways you can get to this form. One has to do with this checklist name field and the other one has to do with the project name field.

Let's cancel out of this and we're taken back to the home page for this organization. If you look over to the right you see a button that says "Copy Checklist to Task List" and if you click that, it opens an accordion menu that contains a list of all of the checklists that belong to the organization you're currently working in - you can click again to close it. If you select one of the buttons from the list, it takes you back to the same "Copy Checklist to Task List" page we were just on but now, the name of the checklist we just clicked on is already selected for us so that's the second way we can get to this "Copy Checklist" page.

The third way we can get to this page has to do with this project field. Remember I said that if the project you want to copy a checklist to the task list for hasn't been created, you have to create the project first - let's go create a new project. To do that, we can come up to the "Org Setup" button on the main menu and go down to the "Projects" link and click that but there's also this "Add Project" button in the sidebar of this page that's probably a little quicker. Either way, we're brought to the projects page where we can see our existing projects on the right and right here we can create a new project. Let's type in a name for our new project, let's enter "232 Sunnydale Drive" and click the "Add Project" button and again look at that, here we are for a third time on the "Copy Checklist to Task List" page. This time we see a note at the top of the page saying that our new project was added successfully and if you look at the project name field, you see that the name of the new project we just created is already selected for us. The idea is that whenever you're creating a new project, the first thing you'll probably want to do is copy a checklist for it.

Let's leave that project selected and next, let's select a checklist to make a copy of and for this first go around, I'm going to select the one that says "New Listing For Sale Version 1".

Finally, there are two more fields on this form, the first one, the "User Assigned" is required and the other one, the "Checklist Copy Name" is optional. For the "User Assigned" field, I'm going to quickly select "Andy Agent" from the drop down list but don't worry about that for now. I'm going to come back to that in just a minute.

The last field that can be specified when copying a checklist to a project is the "Checklist Copy Name" field. The purpose of this field is to allow you to give a name to the set of tasks that belong to a given copy of a checklist. This is an optional field and I'm not going to cover it in this video. Instead, I'll do a separate video explaining an example of a situation where it would be necessary to use this field. Just know that the system doesn't require you to enter anything into this field but that there are some situations where it will be necessary to use it.

So once you've got this form filled out and you're ready to copy the checklist, you just come down to the bottom of the page and click the "Copy Checklist" button and in just a couple of seconds we see some messages at the top of the page that say that one checklist was copied, that 9 tasks were copied successfully as well as some other information.

This has brought us to the "Checklists Copied" page and this is a page where you can see and work with all of the existing copies of checklists that exist for your organization. If you use this application very much, you'll probably find that this is an extremely useful page and there's a separate video for it but while we're here I'll quickly show you a couple of things that will help you understand the concept of checklist copies in this application.

What this page is showing us is all of the copies of checklists that exist in the database for this organization. It's not the tasks that came from the copy, those are on the task list. Each entry in this list represents a copy of a checklist.

It lists the checklist copies in reverse chronological order of the date the copy was made so the most recently made copies show up at the top of the page and so the first item we see is obviously the one that we just made, it's the most recent. We see the name of the checklist that was copied, the project that it was copied for and the date and time that it was copied. We also see the total number of tasks that belong to this copy of this checklist and how many those tasks have been completed so far That makes this a really convenient place to very quickly and easily see exactly what's going with each checklist copy that exists for your organization. This set of tasks right here, these nine tasks that were copied to the task list with this copy of this checklist are what you might hear me refer to as a "Task Group". They're the group of tasks that were added to the task list by this copy of this checklist.

Below each entry on this page, we also have two links that allow us to "View These Items" and to "Delete This Copy and All of It's Items". The "View These Items" link takes you back to the main page for this organization that displays the actual task list and filters the task list to show only the tasks that belong to this "Task Group" - only the tasks that were added to the task list by this copy of this checklist. I'll go ahead and warn you up front that if you try that, when you get to the task list there's a pretty good chance that you won't see all of the tasks that belong to that checklist copy and you'll think something isn't working correctly but there are several reasons why that will happen. I'll explain those in the video on the "Checklists Copied" page so be sure to watch that video. The "Delete This Copy and All of It's Items" link does exactly what you'd expect it to do.

So, let's go look at these tasks on the home page for this organization. Right now we only see the one task that got assigned to Bob Broker because that's who we're currently logged in as. Let's click on the "Task Sort & Filter Options" button to open that menu and see here under "Filter Tasks for User" it says Bob Broker but because Bob has a high enough level of user rights in this organization, you have to be a manager or above, he has the ability to see the tasks assigned to any member of this organization. So let's change that to "Tasks for All Users" and then click the "Update Task Sorting and Filtering" button. Now we see that we did in fact copy 9 tasks that to the task list and we can see who each one is assigned to. These were assigned to Andy Agent and when we get down to the 6th one it's assigned to Wally Webmaster and down here at the bottom we have one assigned to Sally Secretary and the one assigned to Bob. So we have successfully copied a checklist to our task list - that's all there is to it.

Now, let's go back and talk about the "User Assigned" a little more. Notice here that all of these tasks are assigned to the user "Andy Agent" except for "Add the property to the company website", which is assigned to Wally Webmaster, "Make File for New Listing", which is assigned to Sally Secretary and "Review File and Web Page for Accuracy and Completeness" which is assigned to Bob Broker. With that in mind, let's go to our "Checklists" page and take a look at that checklist.

If we look at the items that make up this checklist, we see that the users who were assigned the tasks on the task list are the exact ones that are assigned to the tasks on the checklist so the application did exactly what it was supposed to do. The problem with this however, is that Andy Agent is not the only real estate agent who works at our company, we also have another agent named Angie Agent, who, by the way, is not related to Andy, in case you're wondering. What we really need to be able to do is assign these tasks to whichever agent is working on a particular listing transaction. Right now, we couldn't use this checklist for a listing Angie is working on because it would assign all the tasks she needs to do to Andy. If we edit one of these items and come down to the "User Assigned" field, we see that we could change this to Angie but we would have to do that for every one. You also wouldn't want to try to maintain separate checklists for each agent, that would be a pain and every time you updated your checklist you would have to remember to update every copy of it and what if we had 5 or 10 or 20 agents. There is a much better way.

Let's first delete the checklist copy that we just made, we're done with it and next let's go the the main "Checklists" page and look at Version 2 of this same checklist. On this checklist, instead of those tasks being assigned to Andy, they're assigned to someone called "Assign User When Copying Checklist". If we scroll down, we see that "Add the property to the company website", is still assigned to Wally Webmaster, "Make File for New Listing", is still assigned to Sally Secretary and "Review File and Web Page for Accuracy and Completeness" is still assigned to Bob Broker so those haven't changed. We've left them like that because those users are always going to be assigned to those tasks no matter which of our agents is working on a particular transaction.

This user, "Assign User When Copying Checklist" is not a real user, it's sort of a pseudo user that can only be assigned to tasks on a checklist, it can't be assigned to tasks on the actual task list and using it allows us to dynamically assign some or all of the tasks on a checklist to a certain specified user each time the checklist is used by copying it to the task list.

Again, the pseudo user "Assign User When Copying Checklist" cannot be assigned to tasks on the actual task list, only to tasks on a checklist. You can still assign a task on a checklist to an actual user, like these three assigned to Wally, Sally and Bob are, and if you do then that user will be assigned to that task every time that checklist is copied but assigning tasks on a checklist to the pseudo-user "Assign User When Copying Checklist" allows you to determine who those tasks will be assigned to each time the checklist is copied.

Let's make a new copy of a checklist, this time using version 2 of our checklist, let's make this one for the project "123 Anywhere Drive" and next is the "User Assigned" field that we sort of skipped over when we made the last checklist copy. If you read below it it says that "This user will be assigned to any tasks where user assigned in the checklist is " * Assign User When Copying Checklist"." So this IS where we decide which member of our organization we want to dynamically assign to those tasks to for THIS copy of THIS checklist. So let's say that this is Andy's listing so we'll select him from the drop down list and copy the checklist. Again it says that 1 checklist was copied and 9 tasks were copied. If we look at the entry for the checklist copy right here it says that the default user was "Andy Agent".

If we go look at these tasks on the task list, we see that these tasks did get assigned to Andy Agent but when we get down to "Add the property to the company website", it did get assigned to Wally Webmaster, "Make File for New Listing", did get assigned to Sally Secretary and "Review File and Web Page for Accuracy and Completeness" did get assigned to Bob Broker so everything appears to have worked like it was supposed to.

Let's go make another new copy of version 2 of our checklist, let's make this one for the project "321 Somewhere Place" and this time let's select "Angie Agent" for our "User Assigned" and click to make the copy. Again it says that 1 checklist was copied and 9 tasks were copied. This time if we look at the entry for the checklist copy right here it says that the default user was "Angie Agent".

If we go look at these tasks on the task list, we see that this time these tasks did get assigned to Angie Agent but again, when we get down to "Add the property to the company website", it again was assigned to Wally Webmaster, "Make File for New Listing", again was assigned to Sally Secretary and "Review File and Web Page for Accuracy and Completeness" again was assigned to Bob Broker so again everything appears to have worked like it was supposed to.

I can easily see this feature being useful for many different types of organizations. A service company with different service personnel would need to be able to assign certain tasks to whichever service person is assigned to a given job. An accounting firm would need to be able to assign certain tasks to whichever one of their staff accountants is assigned to work with a certain customer. I think there are a lot of situations where this feature will be helpful.

Before we finish up, I want to quickly just make you aware of one other feature that's also related to dynamically assigning tasks to different members of your organization but works a little differently. I'm going to cover it in another video, but I do want to go ahead and just quickly make you aware of it. Let's go back to version 2 of our checklist and let's edit this first item and click on the drop down box for the user assigned. When we were here before you might have noticed that there is another suspicious user showing up in this drop down list called "Assign User by Job" and as you may have suspected, that is another pseudo user who also can only be assigned to tasks on a checklist, not to tasks on the actual task list. Just know that in this context, a "Job" doesn't represent a job as in a job that you're working on like working on a project for a specific customer. This represents a job in the context of a job that someone does - Wally has the job of Webmaster, Sally has the job of Secretary, etc.

So now we know how to create checklists and make copies them and we even know how to dynamically assign tasks to different members of the organization but there are still several more extremely important and useful feature of checklists that we haven't covered yet. Let's cover the "Task Dependencies" feature in the next video.