When you click the Clients & Contacts button from the main menu Navigator screen, you will first see the Client and Contact list screen, very similar to the Quotes and Orders list screen. It is called Clients and Contacts because you may have not only people who are your clients, but people who are insurance agents or personal contacts listed here so that you can contact them as well and keep track of it in the database, but they don't have to be marked as Clients. That is an option on each contact record, and you will see that explained more on the detailed information about the Contact Information Screen.
In the box labeled Search For at the top, just type whatever you are looking for, and hit [Enter] on your keyboard or click the Search button. You can search by a customer's last name, their phone number, address, or any other field by which you want to search.
You can actually set the fields that are searched in by moving the mouse over the text that says "Search By". You will see that it is a button and when you click it, you can change the list of fields that are searched in and the order in which it searches. This is useful for speeding up searches in large databases. The fewer fields you have in this list, the faster it will find your results. For instance, if you have a large database (in excess of 10000 customer records), you will probably want to set the search fields to just be the phone number fields first and make a habit of just finding customers by their phone number. Click here for more information on setting the Search Fields.
Once you have found the client you are looking for, just double-click on the row in the grid to access the Contact Information Screen. You can also stay on the keyboard and not have to use the mouse by typing what you are searching for, hitting [Enter], then [Tab] twice.
Broaden Search
When you have this box checked, the program will search all of the fields in your search list and show all the records that had a match in any of those fields. For instance, if you type "Andrews" in the search box, then it will show the customers with a last name of Andrews, as well as the customers whose address is on Andrews St, as well as the customers whose company name starts with Andrews.
If you leave this box unchecked, then it searches in the fields in your search list in order, and as soon as a match is found, the search stops and shows you those matches. For example, when you type "Smith" in the search for box, if Last Name is the first field that is searched, it will show you all of the entries with Smith as the last name, and the search will stop. It won't also show you entries with a company name of, say, Smith Brothers, unless there is no record with a last name of Smith, so then it will continue the search in the company name field, and stop when it finds any matches.
Search Any Part of Field
When you have this box checked, then it finds entries where any part of the field matched what you searched for. For example, if you have this box checked and you type "smith", it will not only find "Mr. Smith", but it will also find "Mrs. Ablesmith". If you have this box unchecked, then it would only find Mr. Smith. If you make a habit of just typing "W" to pull up all of the clients whose last name starts with W, then you want to be sure you have this box unchecked, or else it would pull up anything with a "W" in it at all.
Sorting the results
You can sort the orders listed by any of the fields shown simply by clicking on the field's column header. For example, to sort by the last name, simply click on the last name column header, right at the top where it reads "Last Name". Notice the little A>Z notation that will appear in the column header next to Last Name. This indicates to you that that is how you have the list sorted.
Also, notice that if you wanted the list sorted in descending order instead of ascending (meaning that the Zs will be first in the list), you can click on the column again, and it will switch to descending, or Z>A. This is not usually used for text fields, but is common for a date field, since you might want to see the most recent ones listed first.
Remember that practically any grid like this you see in the program functions in this manner, so this is a universal tool for sorting. Also, remember that whichever field you leave the contacts sorted by, it will remember that the next time you open the client/contact list screen.
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