Business Application-related Features What’s new in OpenERP

59 Figure 7.8: Project Dashboard A user’s home page is automatically reassigned during the creation or upgrading of a database. It is custom to as- sign a dashboard to someone’s home page but any OpenERP screen can be assigned to the home page of any user. Tip: Creating shortcuts Each user has access to many menu items from the menu. But in general an employee uses only a small part of the system’s functions. So you can define shortcuts for the most-used menus. These shortcuts are personal for each user. To create a new shortcut just click the ‘’ of the header of the view in web client. To remove a shortcut just click the link and again click ‘’ of the header of the view. The following sections present an overview of the main functions of OpenERP. Some areas are covered in more detail in the following chapters of this book and you will find many other functions available in the optional modules. Functions are presented in the order that they appear on the main menu.

7.5.1 Basic Concepts

Partners Contacts To get familiar with the OpenERP user interface, you will start working with information about partners. Clicking Sales → Address Book → Customers brings up a list of partners that were automatically loaded when you created the database with Load Demonstration Data checked. Search for a partner Above the partner list you will see a search form that enables you to quickly filter the partners. The Customers filter is enabled by default showing partners who are customers. If you have applied no filter, the list shows every partner in the system. For space reasons this list shows only the first few partners. If you want to display other records you can search for them or navigate through the whole list using the First, Previous, Next , Last arrows. 60 Figure 7.9: Standard partner search Note: List limits By default the list in the GTK client shows only the first 80 records, to avoid overloading the network and the server. But you can change that limit by clicking the selection widget showing 80 by default to the right of the search criteria. Similarly the list in the web client shows only the first 20, 50, 100, 500 or unlimited records. The actual number can be switched by clicking the link between the PREVIOUS and NEXT buttons and selecting one of the other limits. In the web version, if you click the name of a partner, the form view corresponding to that partner opens in Read- Only mode. In the list you could alternatively click the pencil icon to open the same form in Edit mode. Once you have a form you can toggle between the two modes by clicking Save or Cancel when in Edit mode and Edit when in Read-Only mode. Partner form The partner form contains several tabs, all referring to the current record: • General, • Sales Purchases, • Accounting, • History, • Notes. The fields in a tab are not all of the same type – some such as Name contain free text, some such as the Language enable you to select a value from a list of options, others give you a view of another object such as Partner Contacts – because a partner can have several contacts or a list of links to another object such as Partner Categories . There are checkboxes such as the Active field in the Sales Purchases tab, numeric fields such as Credit Limit in the Accounting tab and date fields such as Date.