NetChecklist.com Basic Navigation Video

This video explains how to navigate in the NetChecklist.com task management application.

Video Transcript - Navigating Within 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 navigating within the application.

The first thing you have to know is that the application groups everything into organizations and you can be a member of multiple organizations using a single log in account. Here we've logged in as a fictional user named Bob Broker, we see that up here at the top right of the screen. At this point, Bob is logged into the application but he isn't working in any organization. We see a list of the organizations that Bob is a member of over here, Bob is currently a member of 4 organizations with account he's currently logged in under.

Notice that while we're here we don't see a task list or any of the menu buttons that let us work with checklists or do any of the other useful things the application can do. Because all of those things must belong to an organization you won't even see the menu items to work with any of them until you actually go into an organization. While you're still on this page you will still see a "My User Settings" button where you can edit your user settings because, again, as we discussed in the introduction video, your user account doesn't belong to any organization. You'll also see a "Logout" button.

Once you do go into an organization, which we can do just by clicking on the button for one of the organizations we're a member of either here or here, we'll see the organization name appear here, we'll see more menu buttons appear and we would see our task list here if we had any uncompleted tasks for this organization. This is the home page for THIS organization, it's the page where you work with your task list and you get to it using this menu button here - notice that it has the name of the organization and "Home". We do have another home button here. This button takes us back out of the organization to the same page we were on when we first logged in where we had to choose an organization to go into.

Let's go back into the same organization we were just in and again, this takes to the organization home page - the home page for whichever organization you're currently working in. Now, this IS the page where you do all of the work with your actual task list and it's the only page where you can work with the actual task list. You can sort your task list in several different ways and filter your task list to show or not show different types of tasks, but no matter how you sort or filter your tasks, you'll still be looking at your task list on this page. This is also the page where you can mark tasks complete as well as do a few other things with tasks.

Next, notice that two of these buttons are actually split menu buttons. You can click the main part of these buttons to go to a specific page, either the main page for this organization or the checklists page where you manage all of the checklists for the organization and alongside each of these buttons there's also a down arrow that you can click to see some additional options. Under the main page for this organization, you'll find menu buttons to go to pages where you can add a single task and manage recurring single tasks.

If you click the down arrow next to the Checklists button, you'll find some additional menu items that are all related to Checklists. You can go to a page to Copy a Checklist to the Task List, which is how you actually use a checklist. Selecting "Checklists Copied" takes you to a page where you can see a list of each copy or each instance of a checklist that exists in the database. I find myself using this page quite often and you probably will as well.

Next, you can go to a page to manage the organization's Recurring Checklists. You can also make a duplicate copy of an entire checklist. You can work with checklist branches and finally, you can create an entirely new checklist and you can add a new task to an existing checklist.

Next is the Org Setup button which is not a split button. This is only a drop down button - there is no Org Setup page that you can go to. So don't click this button and expect it to take you anywhere - it doesn't. It just opens the menu of items below it. Under it you'll see menu items to manage the projects for this organization, to manage the users who are members of this organization, to manage task classes, to manage the jobs for this organization, and to change the name of this organization.

I want to point out here that we're only seeing some of the items that we see here because we're logged in as a user who is an owner of this organization which is the highest level of rights a user can have within an organization. If we were logged in as a user who is anything less than an owner of the organization we would not see some of these items. For example, only an owner can change the organization name. Many of these other items can be seen by administrators of an organization but not by users who aren't administrators - in particular this "Org Setup" button where you can add users to, and remove users from an organization as well as change the user role of each member of an organization. Keep in mind however that a user's permissions can vary from organization to organization so just because a user might not be an administrator of this organization doesn't mean that they can't be an administrator of another organization they're a member of.

Let's go back to the home page for this organization and on this page, Bob will see his task list if he currently has any uncompleted tasks as well as a couple of other buttons. The "Task Sort and Filter Options" button opens an accordion menu where you can set all of the different sorting and filtering options for your task list. You can click it to open it and click it again to close it. At the top we can choose to sort our tasks in several different ways. These sorting options don't effect which tasks show up on your list, only the order that they appear in. Below the task sorting options we can filter our tasks based on several different criteria. These do effect which tasks will show up on your task list. I'll do another video on task sorting and filtering. Whenever you change any of the sorting and filtering options, you have to click this button that says "Update Filtering for Task List" to make the new settings take effect - just clicking the "Task Sort and Filter Options" button to close the accordion menu will not make any changes take effect. Finally, no matter how many filtering options you've changed you can reset all of them at any time and go back to the default settings just by clicking this "Reset Filters to Defaults" link here at the bottom of the filtering section.

Below the "Task Sort and Filter Options" button is a "Copy Checklist to Task List" shortcut button. This button actually takes you to the same page where you'll go if you select the "Copy Checklist to Task List" menu item under the "Checklists" button on the main menu but this one works just a little differently because it first opens an accordion menu where you can click the name of the checklist that you want to copy and then when it takes you to the page where you copy a checklist to a project, that checklist will already be selected for you.

The third and final button on the right side of the home page for whatever organization you're working in is a link to the "Checklists Copied" page and again, this is the page where you can see all of the copies of checklists that have already been made for this organization. This link takes you to exactly the same page that the "Checklists Copied" menu item on the main menu under "Checklists" does. I just added the extra button here because when using this application, I find myself going to this page pretty often and it's just a little faster to click on it here than it is to go up to the main menu and select it that way.

So that's the menu buttons on the sidebar of the main page, next let's go the the "Checklists" page. On the right side of this page, we see a list of all of the checklists that belong to this organization and we can just select one to edit it. When a checklist is selected, it's button will be slightly darker to indicate that it is the one that's currently selected and you'll see all of the individual items that make up that checklist in the main part of the page and you'll also see an option to "Edit Checklist Name/Description" at the top of the page. On the individual tasks that belong to this checklist you can edit or delete any of these items or you can make any of them dependent on another item in this checklist.

If you go to the "Projects" page, you can add a new project to this organization. We can also see a list of the projects that belong to this organization and can edit any of them by selecting one from this list.

Next we can go to our "Task Classes" page. Task Classes basically provide another really helpful way to further organize your work. From this page we can add a new task class and if we have any set up we can edit or delete them.

One other thing I'd like to point out is that I have included title tags on most if not all of these buttons so if you just hover over a button for a moment, a text box will usually appear that will give a little more detail about what link does.

Again, whenever you're ready to leave an organization, possibly to go work in another organization, you can simply select this "Home" button at the top of the page which takes you out of your current organization to the same page you go to when when you first log in. You can also select the "Log Out" button at the top of the page which does exactly what you would expect. It is not necessary to go out of whatever organization you're working in before you log out. Logging out will clear all of that out for you.

Finally, the last thing to understand about navigating within this application is that it's built on what's called a responsive design which means that the layout changes in response to the size of the screen it's being displayed on and the purpose of that is to allow the application to remain usable when it's displayed on a smaller screen such as a mobile phone.

The easiest way to illustrate this is to go back into our organization so that all of our menu items are displayed and then gradually decrease the size of the window that the web browser is displayed in. And once we get to a certain point, there we go, the menus change. This menu is designed to be usable by touching the items with your fingers on a mobile phone screen.

Now even though the screen looks different, we haven't navigated to another page, we're still on the main page for this organization which displays our task list, we just have to scroll down a little to see it and these menu items are pretty much like the ones on the main menu but there are a few differences. Rather than spending time going into the details of those differences here, I'm going to do that in a separate video which you can watch if you plan to use the application on a device with smaller screen.

So that's how we navigate within this application.