Many users will already be aware of the ability to optionally display different menu items to different groups of users. However, did you also know that as well as being able to control what menus users can see, you can also control what companies the users can log into, what reports they can run, what buttons are visible on the screens and also what individual fields they can see within the screen grids.

For example, if you don’t want your sales order entry staff to see the costs of the item on the sales order line, then we can easily hide the cost field from the sales order group of users while the costs can be still be left visible to your supervisor staff. Using the various security settings, you can tailor your system so that only those staff that need to see certain sets of data can see it.

All of these updating options are held within the System Security for Standard Menu option. If you would like to learn more about the Security settings, either give us a call or look at the on line WinMAGI Procedural help.

PS. To look at the WinMAGI on line ‘Procedural Help’, right mouse click on the “?” help button in any of the screens. The online ‘Procedural Help’ gives step by step instructions to help you use your system more efficiently and can also be used as a training guide. Note also that the Procedural Help can be printed.

Customers that have being using WinMAGI for some time are now likely to have orders in the system that go back a number of years. To help improve the general performance of the system, it may be time to consider archiving some of these older orders. WinMAGI has a full suite of archive programs that allow us to selectively archive your transaction files. The benefits of archiving your data is that the lookups and enquiries will display the more relevant data, there will be a general improvement in the speed of the system and the overall size of the data files in the system will be reduced. Also, archiving doesn’t mean that the data is gone forever. Archived data can be re-instated if required. For further information about archiving your old data, please contact the Help Desk.

Many users already know about the Shortcut facility. The WinMAGI menu options can be setup into your own personal menu so that you no longer need to navigate through the system to find your most used menu options. To setup a shortcut, simply find the menu option in the system and right mouse click on that option. You will be prompted to add the selected menu option to your shortcuts menu. Once added to your shortcut menu, all you need to do is click on the Shortcut tab in your standard menu and your favourite menu options will be there. If you find that after a while your Shortcut tab is getting a bit busy, just right mouse click on the old entries in the Short Cut tab to remove them.

Many users already know about the facility to export the details of the WinMAGI screen grids directly to Excel. However, did you also know that you can control where that spreadsheet will go to, whether it will automatically load upon creation and whether the spreadsheet will have column totals? The User Preferences settings (see User Preferences->Maintenance->WinMAGI properties) allow each user to control where and how the Excel spreadsheet will be created. For example, if you want the numeric columns in the Excel spreadsheet to automatically total, simply tick the ‘Automatic totals on numeric columns’ field on the ‘Grid Export’ tab. When you next export one of the WinMAGI grids to Excel, all of the numeric columns in the grid will have a ‘Total’ cell for all of the numeric columns in the spreadsheet. Try out the other options, such as ‘Automatic Freeze Heading Line’, to see how these options can work for you.

Note that we also recommend that you specify a local ‘Export File Directory’ that specifies a local directory on your PC. This ensures that you do not have update conflicts with other users who may be exporting the same data at the same time.