Alert reader Dennis Harrington asked me to explain further our preferred way of handling “last completed call” in GoldMine. My response:

I would use the built-in MasterMine template called “Last completed call”.  The advantages are these:
1. I can include any data elements from history or contact1 or contact2 just by checking them on.  No need to know GoldMine data structure and field names.
2. It pulls date, reference, notes, etc. already formatted in a useful way, so I don’t have to construct expressions that strip trailing spaces, parse out data from “shared” fields like history reference, etc.
3. Best of all, it gives me a multi-dimensional pivot-table to work with instead of just a flat list.  I can arrange this a million possible different ways to tell me anything I need to know that relates to “last call” instead of just giving me one answer to one question.
4. The whole package is stored as a re-usable Excel workbook, so I can retrieve, refresh and re-purpose this info any time I need to.