One of my favorite things about ACT! is how flexible it is. I am always taking a specific feature that was meant for something else and re-purposing it for my own use… and it is usually really easy to do.
For example, take the Secondary Contacts feature. It was designed to provide a way to keep an unlimited number of alternate contacts that would be used for information purposes only (since you can’t keep history or include in mail-merges). I regularly use this feature to keep track of Accounts Payable personnel who were helpful in getting an invoice paid or for the name of the IT person that handles the client’s internal PC problems. However I also use Secondary Contacts to keep track of other things as well.
For example, I also use it to remind me of usernames and passwords. You can create a contact record in ACT! for “American Express”. Or you could create a catch-all record with the name “Susan Logins” (which you can mark as Private or as Limited Access so that only specific associates can see the record and associated data).
You could use the Secondary Contacts feature to keep track of your customer logins.
Now create a new Secondary Contact record.
Procedure: To add a Secondary Contact
1. On the Contact’s record, display the Secondary Contacts tab.
2. Click the New Secondary Contact button on the tab,
3. Fill in the data as desired. For example, in the Contact field, enter the type or purpose of the record, such as ”AMX Login”. In the Title field, enter your username and password. Enter a Customer Support phone number if you like. In the Web site, copy and paste the actual login website url that takes you straight to the login screen. Mark the record as Private if it will be in a multi-user database and you don’t want others to see your password.
4. Click OK.
Note: Secondary Contacts display in alphabetical order by last name… in this case “login”.
Note that the Secondary Contact has been marked Private, so only you can see the username and password. Doulbe-click to display the weblink.
Entering the username and password in the Title field allows for quick reference. Double-click any Secondary Contact to display the complete information. You can click the hyperlinked Web site field to open the site in your default Internet browser.
You can create as many Secondary Contact records as you like.
I love figuring out different ways to use things to be more productive. Have you used this feature for something different?
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
This is a terrific idea – using secondary contacts to ‘group’ a specific and highly specialized type of information.
Until now, I’ve created a separate contact for each account. I put the institution name or website in the Company field, tag them with the ID/Status of “Accounts” and I put the username/password combination in a Note.
This is much more compact and, I hope, easier to use.
Thank you Susan!
Thanks for the tip, Susan…..I sure like the help I get from Ginger and Dave…….
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[hope your air conditioning is working everywhere you go....
Great tip. Very clever. I was starting to go nuts trying to organize my logon information.
I’ve used my ACT for passwords for a long time. I’ve also customized the field names with various titles that customizes my business needs. I didn’t realize you could mark them private and greatful for this tip! I’ll use secondary contact for passwords now! Thanks Susan!
It’s certainly a very intersting solution for that kind of problems, but what we really need that is another tab in “table” form for that kind of information, not only for login’s and password, but all small pieces of info who are to disparate to put in the “Detail” window or the other tab windows like “personal Info” and “user fileds” tabs.
I should make reference to Goldmine 6.7 edition in 2000 and before where you found yet a tab named “Detail” in table form. I suppose it contued to exist in later editions.
Could Sage Act adapt there software in that sense? or maybe Connerstone could develop it?
Wilfried,
Handling non-standard info is always a trial. You don’t want to add so many fields that it becomes cumbersome to fill in the data, but you don’t want people adding the non-specific information to specific fields (like Address 3, which might get printed out in mailings). The best answer is to add your own specific fields to ACT… or call us to take care of it for you. That gives me a great tip idea about creating the Trivia field. Thanks.