Issue 7 • ACT! 2005/2006 Edition

Dear FIRSTNAME,

This issue of our tips & tricks newsletter focuses on how to get activities on your calendar.

ACT! comes bundled with a fully-featured calendar, scalable to use as a personal calendar or as a shared office scheduling system. With ACT!, you can schedule activities with any of the contacts in your database.

Because each activity is linked to a specific contact in the database, it's easy to create reports that show your activity with a group of contacts.

Click these links to learn more detailed information about the the tips outlined in this issue:

As always, if you have any questions about ACT!, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me at 800-322-1049.

Best regards,

The staff at

Innovative Solutions
 

  

Brought to you by:

Innovative Solutions
ACT! Certified Consultants
4423 Lehigh Road
Suite 404
College Park, MD 20740
800-322-1049
www.is-crm.com
 

  

L A T E S T   N E W S

This section removed for the newsletter archive.
 

We recommend that you purchase:

Managing Contacts
with ACT! 2006
$24.99   $22.49

Click here to order.
 
 
Filtering the Calendar
Relevant for ACT! 2005 & ACT! 2006 Users

The specific activities that appear on your calendar are dependent on the current calendar filter settings. The Today, Daily, Weekly, Work Week, and Monthly calendars all share the same filter, so changing filter settings in one calendar will apply the new filter to the other four calendar views.

If you are missing activities, make sure they haven't been filtered out. It almost goes without saying, but if you uncheck all of the options in the Types and Priorities drop-downs, ACT! will never show any activities on your calendar. Calendar filters in ACT! 2006 are now sticky.

In ACT! 2005, you would have to set the calendar filters each time you launched the product. In ACT! 2006, the program will remember your filter settings from the last session.

To filter the calendar to show just a specific type of activities:

  1. Click the Calendar button on the View bar to open ACT!'s calendar interface.
  2. Click View | Filter Calendar View. The Filter Calendar dialog box will appear.
  3. In the Users area, select up to 10 users whose activities you'd like to see on the calendar.
  4. In the Type dropdown, select whether to show or hide calls, meetings, and to-dos, as well as any other activity types you've created in the database.
  5. In the Priorities drop-down, select the priorities you'd like to view. If, for example, you uncheck the Low option, ACT! won't display any of the low-priority activities on your calendar views.
  6. Select whether to show or hide cleared activities and private activities.
 
Scheduling an Activity
Relevant for ACT! 2005 & ACT! 2006 Users

If you're an ACT! 6.0 user, you'll notice that scheduling activities in ACT! 2006 is now a lot easier. The Schedule Activity dialog box has been redesigned to make often-used features -- like the Private Activity checkbox field -- easier to access. You also now have the option to specify the End Time and End Date for any activity.

There are about 80 ways to schedule an activity in ACT!, and each activity scheduling method launches the Schedule Activity dialog box. Once in the Schedule Activity dialog box, you can set basic attributes for the activity.

To schedule an activity for a contact:

  1. In the Contact View, lookup the contact with whom you would like to schedule an activity.
  2. Click Schedule | Call, Meeting, or To-do.
  3. If you'd like to schedule a custom activity type, click Schedule | Other and select the type of activity.
  4. Enter a Start Date, End Date, Start Time, and End Time for your activity.
  5. In the With field, you'll see that the contact you looked up in Step 1 is shown. You could change this field to schedule the activity with another contact in the database.
  6. In the Regarding field, type a general description of the activity.
  7. Give the activity a priority, and select a color for the activity.
  8. If you'd like ACT! to ring an alarm before your activity occurs, check the Ring Alarm option.
  9. If you select to show a full day banner, the activity will display as the main activity for the day in the Monthly Calendar View only.
  10. Click OK. The activity will appear on your calendar.
 
Sending E-mails to Activity Participants
Relevant for ACT! 2005 & ACT! 2006 Users

You can easily set ACT! to automatically send an email to each activity participant as a reminder. When you have this option checked, ACT! will draft an email to each activity participant, and the program will even attach the activity (in both ACT! and Outlook formats) to the outgoing message. Your activity participant will be able to double-click the email attachment to add the activity automatically to his or her ACT! or Outlook calendar.

Before using the Automatic Email feature for activity participants, you'll need to configure ACT!'s email settings. Click Tools | Preferences | Email tab. Then, click the Email System Setup button to set ACT! to work with Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, or Internet Mail.

To automatically create an e-mail message for activity participants:

  1. Bring up the Schedule Activity dialog box and set the basic activity attributes. (See the previous tip.)
  2. In the upper right corner of the Schedule Activity dialog box, click the Options drop-down.
  3. Select the option to send an activity email.
  4. Click OK to schedule the activity. ACT! will automatically draft an outgoing message for all activity participants.

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© 2006 Thomson Course Technology.  Text adapted from Managing Contacts with ACT! 2006. Reprinted with permission.