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Field Setup You can customize many of the fields you use to store volunteer, Assignment, Site, Place, and coordinator information in Volgistics. For example, you can re-name a field to more closely suit your organization’s needs, hide fields you don’t currently care to use, and create look-up values for fields that have drop-down lists. Before you can customize a field in Volgistics you must know which Tab the field is located on. Every volunteer, assignment, site, place, and coordinator field is located on one tab or another. For example, the ‘Date or Birth’ field is located on the Profile tab in the volunteer record. To locate the tab that contains the field you want to modify, just browse through the database until you locate the field, and then note which tab it’s on. Note that some tabs may have fields that you cannot currently see because they’re hidden. In these cases make a note of the tab you want to add a field to.  To change a field’s properties: 1. Choose Setup from the menu. 2. Click on Field Options. A list of all the tabs in Volgistics appears. 3. Select the tab that contains the field you would like to customize. A list of all the fields located on this tab appears. 4. Click the field you want to customize. The Field Properties window opens. Depending upon the field you have selected, you can rename or hide the field, require an entry in the selected field, establish a default entry, format the field, maintain drop-down table entries, and establish database operator rights.  Changing the name of the field If you want to change a field’s name, enter the new field name in the ‘Field name,’ then click Save. The original name of the field always appears at the top of the Field Properties screen. If you want to change the name of the field back to the default, type the original name next in ‘Field name.’ Things to consider if you rename fields:
Reformatting a field Most Volgistics fields have a fixed field type (you can’t change it). Fields with the default name “Spare field” are the exception to this rule. These fields appear in four locations in Volgistics: * The Personal box on the volunteers Profile tab * The Detail box on the Site tab * The Detail box on the Place tab * The Detail box on the Assignment tab Spare fields are flexible fields—suitable for holding a variety of information. You can format these fields to use any of these formats Text You can enter any value in a text field, including letters, numbers or spaces. Date You must enter two digits for the month and two digits for the day in a date field. You can enter years as two digits or four digits. If you enter a two-digit year, VolunteerWorks converts your entry to a four-digit year. Number (whole) You can enter any whole number in these fields (e.g. 123). Number (1 decimal place) You can enter any number with up to one decimal place in these fields (e.g. 25.5). Number (2 decimal places) You can enter any number with up to two decimal places in these fields (e.g. 25.25). Currency You can enter any number in these fields. Numbers you enter in these fields will contain two decimal places and a dollar sign. Social Security Number Entries in this field must contain 9 digits. Volgistics will format entries using social security format (123-45-6789). You can enter social security numbers with or without punctuation: 123-45-6789 or 123456789 Keep these things in mind if you change the format of a field:
Setting a default value For some fields (but not all) you can specify a “default value.” A default value works like this: when you’re entering a new record and you pass through a field without making an entry, Volgistics inserts the default value for the field. A common use of default values is in the City and State field. For example, you can enter the most common State or Province name for the state field. Then when you add new records you won’t need to enter the state or province for people who live in the default state or province - simply pass through the state field and Volgistics will add your default value. If the “Default value” field is unavailable, this field does not support default values. Require an entry For some fields (but not all), you can specify that the field may not be left blank. If you check this option, system operators cannot save a record until they have made an entry in this field. If you do not check this option, an entry in this field is optional. Normally you would require an entry only for the fields of information that are critical to your program. Use this option sparingly! Remember that an operator cannot save a new record if they don’t have an entry in required fields. Therefore you should only require an entry for fields that, if left empty, would render the rest of the record useless. Consider this example: many people assume that the zip code field should be required since mail can’t be delivered without it. But periodically they want to establish records for prospective volunteers who have called in but who haven’t yet provided their complete addresses. If the zip code is required you can’t enter these records. Consequently there’s a chance that these valuable prospective volunteer leads could be lost because they couldn’t be entered into the system. Hiding an entry Set Hidden to “Yes” if you don’t want this field to appear on the screen. You can hide fields you don’t currently use in order to simplify the screen, and to eliminate the chance that some operators will enter something in this field just because it’s there. For example, if you don’t want to track volunteer gender, you can hide the Gender field. Other things to consider if you hide fields - The field is hidden for all records. - You can unhide the field if you choose to use it later. - Any information that may have been in the field before it was hidden will still be there if you later unhide the field. Managing drop down table items Drop down tables (also known as look-up tables) have a pre-defined table of entries that you can choose from when entering data. Look-up tables have a down-arrow attached to their right edge. The table of entries appears when you click the down-arrow. If the selected field is a drop-down (look at what appears next to “Type of field”), you can use the Field Properties window to maintain field entries. For more information, see Manage Look-up Tables. System operator rights Choose the field ‘rights’ you want each user level to have for the selected field. In Volgistics, each system operator is assigned a ‘user level’ which is either “System administrator,” “Power user,” or “Basic user.” For each of these three user levels, you can set the following rights for the field you’re modifying: View and change Any operator given the corresponding profile has full access to the selected field. They can see the field and edit its contents. View only Any operator given the corresponding profile can see the field, but cannot edit its contents. Hidden This field is hidden from any operator assigned to the corresponding profile. For example, if you set-up a co-worker named “Jennifer,” as a system operator in Volgistics, and you make Jennifer a “Power user,” then she will have whatever level of access you give “Power users” for each field in the database. If you set the ‘Date of birth’ field so Power users have ‘View only’ access, then Jennifer - and all of your other system operators who are Power users - will only be able to view the information in the ‘date of birth’ field. You might set the system operator rights for ‘Basic users” to “Hidden.” This would mean that any system operators in your account who you’ve made “Basic users” will not see the ‘Date of birth’ field on the Core tab at all. Note that in addition to customizing rights for specific fields, you can control access to overall tabs. Each tab can be made visible or hidden to system operators, based on their user level. Use the Tab Rights page to control which tabs Volgistics system operators see in your volunteer records. |
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Printable view Help topic 2017 Added or revised 01-11-2008 |