Category Archives: Quick Tip
Lotus Notes Quick Tip: Hold the Ctrl key while opening a different view to jump to the same document in that view
Mat Newman’s tip about a clever use of categories reminds me of another useful but little-known feature. First, put the focus on a document in a view (click once on it.) Now hold down the control key and click on another view or folder where that document also exists. The view will be opened with the focus on that same document rather than where it was the last time the view was opened. One example of how this is useful is if you want to see other documents that are related and appear near the document in the other view. For example, in your mail file, find a document in the All Documents view. Now hold down the control key and click on the folder where it is filed. Another valuable effect is that if the document doesn’t exist in the second view, the view will be opened in the same place it was when last opened, so you can tell that the document doesn’t exist in the view.
Another place that this used to be helpful was in the help files. If you found a topic in a search, you could switch to the Table of Contents view and it would jump to that same document so you could read all the related documents in the chapter. Unfortunately, that broke with the new navigation format of Help.
The dirty little secret hiding in your Domino Directory
Your Domino directory may be filled with the Lotus Notes equivalent of bedbugs and you would never know it. They appear in the form of documents that don’t belong, but don’t appear in any views.
Occasionally, someone with rights to create documents in your directory will accidentally click paste or Ctrl-V when they shouldn’t have. Perhaps they were in the wrong database when they did it or maybe they meant to cut or copy instead of paste and the clipboard happened to have a Notes document in it when they did. Now a new document is in your directory that shouldn’t be. The problem is that unless the document that was pasted fits the selection criteria for a view, you’ll never see it.
The solution is simple. Create a view in the Domino Directory. I like to copy from the people view. Edit the design of the view and change the selection formula to be Select @All. Add a new first column to the view. Make the value the field called ‘Form’. Sort it and categorize it. You may want to put this viewt in your list of custom admin views if you have any. Open the view and collapse all. Look for any form names that don’t seem right for the directory. Below is a screen shot of a directory with most of the documents you should expect to see. If you see any form names like Memo orJournalEntry, you can be sure the document doesn’t belong.
I have come across some directories that have been around for a long time that had hundreds of junk documents. While it isn’t the end of the world, it is much better to have a clean directory.
Quick Tips: displaying filenames on Workspace icons
Perhaps long-forgotten, this is an age-old tip that I have used forever without thinking about it until someone saw me do it and asked.
First, go to the Workspace. That’s the page everyone uses for their homepage, that looks like an iPhone screen and that IBM doesn’t want us to use because it’s “the old look” of Notes.
Now click on the View menu. If Show Server Names is selected, deselect it and click on the View menu again.
Now that it is unselected, hold down the Shift+Ctrl keys and select Show Server Names.
OK, trivial. But handy when trying to clean up a user’s workspace with a mess of replicas and copies of databases. In dire cases, you may want to also unstack the icons.
The Notes Guy in Seattle 