Can there be a way to hide columns on the Customers screen? One of my customers has a very long email address. Because of this, the Email address column is so wide that the Accounts receivable column is pushed off the right side of the screen.
I can’t see my receivables unless I scroll horizontally. Because this is probably the most important piece of information available to me, I want to be able to see it without having to scroll to look for it.
On the other hand, I really don’t need to see my customers’ email addresses on the Customers summary screen (especially since the email addresses aren’t clickable “mailto:” links, which they should be…). Can I have the option to suppress that column, or can it at least be made narrower (so the address wraps even though it doesn’t contain any spaces)?
Or at least can the less important columns, like Email address and Telephone be moved to the far-right side of the table? Better to have to scroll over to see an email address than to have to scroll to see the receivables.
For Telephone that will work, but won’t it mess up the Email feature if the user hides, deletes, or renames the Email address field?
Perhaps instead, can these two wide and unessential columns at least be moved to the far-right side of the displayed table? That would solve the problem. The only things that would run off the right side of the screen would be them – and I can’t imagine anyone would rather scroll to get to the A/R link than to get to the (unclickable) Email address.
You are right, Email address field won’t be actually converted to a custom field as it has a special meaning. But if you can hide Telephone field, that will create more space for remaining fields.
Marginally, for me, yes. Unfortunately, one of my customers has a ridiculously long email address (11-letter first name dot 17-letter last name at 26-letter domain name), so everything will still get pushed off to the side. I don’t want to delete his email address, because I want to be able to use Manager to send him his invoices automatically. I’ve asked him to shorten his name, but he won’t listen.
@Lubos, I don’t understand why the columns can’t be hidden. There are plenty of other in-built columns on the New Customer form that don’t appear in the Customers grid (e.g., Business Identifier, Billing address, Fax, Mobile, Additional information). So why can’t Email and Telephone be treated similarly (or at least have the option to be treated similarly) to those ones?
I’m sure there’s a good reason, though, so is putting the Email field at the end/far-right of the grid (and Telephone just before it) also not a workable option?
Right now, there is only mechanism to control visibility of custom fields. I’m not totally against the idea to implement mechanism which would allow to control visibility of all columns under each tab. It would be more intuitive but this something completely new.
I think I was unclear in my suggestion, @Lubos. Rather than to be able to control the visibility of the Email (and possibly Telephone) columns, I was suggesting permanently suppressing them entirely for everybody – no option – just as the Fax and Mobile and several other columns are permanently suppressed. Is having email addresses displayed on the main Customers list at all useful to anybody? If one needs the email address for a particular customer, one can click through to the data-entry form for that customer.
My fall-back suggestion of moving the Telephone and Email columns to the far right side were also for everybody – not as user-configurable options. If you think some users really do need to see the email address on the all-Customers screen, I think you’ll probably agree that it’s better to have to scroll over to see the occasional email address (and phone number and perhaps visible custom fields) than to have to scroll over to see the actionable columns like A/R and credits.
There will be plenty of people already adjusted to see email address as a column. And I have no problem with that.
I tend to put figures to the right-side on every tab. No matter which tab you look at, figures are always on the right-side. This suggestion would break consistency.
The only way forward is to make tabs customizable so you can configure which columns to show.
Please think it over. Look at the screen shot I inserted yesterday and think if there’s anything consistent about figures that are pushed off the right side of the screen.
I’m all for making columns customizable, but that’s likely to take a long time to happen given the much more-important things in your roadmap. Would you consider temporarily sacrificing what you see as consistency by moving Email to the right just until you can get around to making the columns suppressable?
(Or how about this for consistency: Figures are always on the right, except when there are email addresses, in which case email addresses are always to the right of figures. Since the Customers tab is the only one with Email addresses, it would still be consistent.)
