Keyboard and speed

Routes are the shortcut#

A hash route is part of the address, so it can be typed, bookmarked, opened in a second browser tab, and put on a phone's home screen. Three or four bookmarks covering the screens you use daily removes most of the navigation from a working day.

Ask rather than navigate#

The Connect Assistant reaches the same records the screens do, through a set of tools rather than a search box — sixty-six of them, of which about half only read. Asking for a person's history, an outstanding draft, a file's contents or what is due today usually beats finding the screen that shows it, particularly when the answer spans two screens.

• It keeps browser-style tabs, each with its own conversation, record, draft, files and scroll position — so a half-finished question survives an interruption.
• The status line tells you what it is doing and how many steps it has taken, with a compact stop control rather than a row of stage indicators.
• What it is told about the screen you are on is checked against the database before it is trusted, so an answer is grounded in records rather than in what a panel happened to be showing.
• Its rights are narrower than yours: it cannot set pricing and cannot clear a do-not-contact entry, whatever you ask it.

Speed that is not the keyboard#

Most of the waiting people notice in business software is the software reading more than it needs to. Connect's screens are built to keep that cost flat as a workspace grows rather than climbing with it — the Home screen was reduced from 133 database statements to 15 and stays there, and the triage strip and workspace console went from 83 and 89 statements to 11 and 17, flat with page size. What that means for you is that a big workspace opens as fast as a small one.

The other kind of speed is not repeating your own work. Saved views on the data grid keep a filter, a sort and a column arrangement you would otherwise rebuild each time; standing instructions stop you re-editing the same sentence; a memory at the contact tier stops you explaining the same customer twice.

What this page will not pretend#

There is no published table of global keyboard chords in this manual, and inventing one would waste your time more thoroughly than having none. Where a screen offers its own keys, the screen is the place they are shown — a grid cell that responds to the usual spreadsheet keys, a text field that submits the way text fields do. Learn the routes, which are stable and documented, rather than guessing at chords.

One control is worth locating with your eyes before you need it in a hurry: the runtime switch in the application shell, which stops Connect acting immediately and changes no settings. Knowing where it is beats knowing any shortcut.

Questions#

Related#

• Connect Assistant
• Using Connect on a phone
• A working day with Connect
• Files and data in Connect
• The query cost that grows with the business
• Stop Connect immediately