The Insider Blog

GoldMine “Groups” and ”Filters” allow you to process multiple GoldMine records with a single action.  Processes like global replace, mass e-mailing, territory realignment, exporting, and many others allow you to use filters and groups.  This is a powerful “force multiplier” built right into GoldMine which many users fail to take advantage of.  Why?  Typically because they don’t know how to create groups and/or find creating filters very cumbersome.

Creating “GoldMine Groups” from a MasterMine report is simple and very nimble.  Using your pivot table, you can easily sift through your contacts using various criteria and create one or many GoldMine groups directly from your drill down sheet in MasterMine.  Even on the drilldown sheet, you have the option of using either all records on the sheet or a fine-tuned manual selection of them.

Since your MasterMine pivot table allows you to ”slice and dice” your data so easily, you can build several parallel groups with mostly similar criteria very easily.  The alternative in GoldMine is to repeatedly create filters from scratch, test the results by activating each filter and looking through the records, then “build a group” from each filter, then move on to the next one. Very laborious!

You can see an example of creating a GoldMine group using MasterMine in the video linked from here. This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page.  Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Learning” webpage.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful. A new video will be added at the beginning of each week, so be sure to check for the new video, as well as subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified when a new video is posted. Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.

Sometimes your GoldMine is set up to store numeric values in “character” fields in GoldMine.  There are many reasons this might be, but an issue is likely to arise when you want to report on that information.  How can you do calculations (like multiplying two fields, or dividing by 15% to calculate commissions on sales?) when you’re working with text instead of a number?

You can copy data conversion expressions from our templates into your own MasterMine reports, using whatever character fields you want to pull numeric data from.   (This one is pretty technical, so ask us for online help if necessary.)

In this week’s video sample, linked from here, our client has created a pay period report for service technicians, calculating hours spent on various types of calls, and needs to multiply hours by rates. Since call “Duration” is stored as a character field in GoldMine, it must be pulled into MasterMine as a number field in order to be useful.  Our trick is to use one of three MasterMine fields that convert the duration into a number: CH.Minutes, CH.Hours, or CH.Amount.

This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page.  Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Learning” webpage.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful. A new video will be added at the beginning of each week, so be sure to check for the new video, as well as subscribe to our YouTube channel to be notified when a new video is posted. Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.

Grouping within a MasterMine Report allows you to aggregate information in various useful ways. You can highlight any selection of items within a field, click “group”, then name the new group and use that new group as a single entity.

For example, in a forecast sales report, you might group your users by sales group, so you can aggregate by region, by product group, by division, or whatever makes sense to you. Grouping all of your sales users into several parallel groups in this way allows you to boil down many individual persons’ results into a higher-level, simpler view across the whole team.  Even better, once you’ve made these groups, they persist for every variation of the same report from then on.

You can see an example of this grouping in the video linked from here. This video is part of a new series of MasterMine videos on our new YouTube page.  Each one is a short extract from a longer training session, which you are welcome to view at your leisure on our new “Video Training” webpage.

Please let us know if you find this video and others like it useful.  Also, if you would like further help implementing the ideas presented in these videos, please don’t hesitate to call our support department for report writing help and more ideas.

Your staff wants to perform to expectations. The trick is to give them the ability to easily self-monitor as they work, making it easier for you to manage them in the long run.

The key is to set up each user with quick reports that show how they are doing on the performance measures you have set up. One typical performance measure for salespeople is a count of outbound calls, broken out by “result code”. You can set up a report that loads and refreshes, on their screen, with a single button click.

MasterMine users can open the report, check their progress quickly, (and bonus: see and fix data they have entered incorrectly) and correct course immediately. This way, they don’t wait until your weekly meeting with them to find out they aren’t doing something right. You may choose to show them a comparison between themselves and others, or isolate only on their performance.

Setting up MasterMine reports like this and deploying them with your end users should not take more than 10 minutes for a trained MasterMine user.

Creating Date Ranges (Grouping by Date):

With Date grouping, you can automatically set up date ranges that include everything before a date, after a date, between two dates but grouped by year, month, quarter, etc.

Once dates are grouped, filtering or displaying by date range becomes VERY easy.

1. First, make sure the date field you wish to group is in either the Row or Column area of your report.

2. With the field button or ONE date item in the field selected, click the group button ( ) on the MasterMine toolbar.

3. Indicate your desired beginning and ending date for data to include, and highlight the time grouping(s) desired. If a certain number of days (like 7 for a week) is desired for the group, only ‘days’ may be selected.

4. Hit “OK” to create new fields for all highlighted date unit groupings (i.e. Year, Quarter, Month, Day).

5. If more than one date is to be grouped in the report, it is wise to rename date fields appropriately (i.e. Modify Year, Modify Month, Modify Date etc.) in order to distinguish them.

Now you can show or hide any of your new date sub-groups, including all records dated before the “Starting at” date or after the “Ending at” date.
Move the grouped date fields (Year, Month, Day, etc.) to the Page Area and simply select the appropriate times (i.e. “2008″ in the “Year” field, “Qtr 2″ in the “Quarter” field, etc.)
IF you decide to leave these fields displayed in the Row or Column area of your report, simply uncheck or check the desired date parts in the dropdown list associated with the date field.

Note that date grouping requires that ALL items in the field are of the datatype “date” (not character, number, or blank). The MasterMine query ensures this in most templates by substituting the date 01/01/1989 if the date field is null for a given record.