Essential features

This chapter brings together Odoo's cross-cutting mechanisms: the chatter, activities, the content editor and property fields. They work identically in every application. Data exchanges, which follow the same cross-cutting logic, are the subject of chapter 22.

The chatter

Every document (contact, quotation, invoice, task, manufacturing order) carries a discussion thread that gathers the history of exchanges and changes.

Writing a note or a message

1. Open the document.
2. At the bottom of the form, choose the writing mode: - Log note: visible to internal users only; - Send message: sent to the document's followers, including external ones.
3. Write the text, attach files if necessary.
4. Send.

Managing followers

The followers icon, at the top of the thread, displays the list of the people who are notified. You can add people, remove them, and restrict the types of notification each of them receives.

Mentioning a colleague or a role

Type @ followed by a user's name in a message or a note: that person receives a notification.

The list offered after @ also carries the roles defined for your organisation. Mentioning a role notifies every user attached to it; beyond fifty recipients, Odoo asks for confirmation before sending.

Activities

An activity is an action to be carried out, with a date and an assignee. It is Odoo's internal follow-up mechanism.

Scheduling an activity

1. Open the document concerned.
2. In the chatter, click Activity.
3. Choose the type from the badges offered: call, meeting, email, to-do, document, or any type defined for your organisation.
4. Summarise the action expected in the Summary field.
5. Fill in the deadline in the Due on field.
6. Name the owner in Assigned To, or a Role when the activity falls to a group of people rather than to someone in particular.
7. Click Save.

Following your activities

The clock icon in the top bar brings together all your activities, sorted into overdue, today and upcoming. They are grouped there by application; a click opens the filtered list of the records concerned, not the document itself.

When activities have been handed to a role you belong to without being assigned to anyone yet, an extra entry at the bottom of this menu counts them and opens their list. Writing your name in the Assigned To column is enough to take one over.

In the applications that offer it, the Activity view presents the records in columns by activity type, which gives an immediate reading of the workload ahead.

The content editor

The rich editor is used everywhere formatted text is expected: descriptions, emails, notes, articles, terms and conditions.

Formatting

Selecting text brings up a toolbar: bold, italic, underline, colour, list, link, alignment.

Typing / at the start of a line opens a menu for inserting a block: heading, table, image, separator, quote, callout, button.

Writing or rewriting with the assistant

The assistant is called from the editor, in both directions: producing a text, or reworking an existing one.

To produce a text from nothing:

1. Place the cursor where you want it.
2. Type / to open the insertion menu, then choose AI in the AI Tools category.
3. Describe the text expected, then insert the proposal.

To rework a passage: shorten, lengthen, change the tone, correct, translate:

1. Select the text concerned.
2. Choose the assistance action in the toolbar, which appears with the selection.
3. State the transformation expected.
4. Compare the proposal with the original text, then accept or reject it.

Property fields

A property field adds a piece of information to a record without changing the data model or resorting to development. It is defined at the level of a parent record and applies to its children: for example a field added on a project and available on all its tasks.

1. Open the record.
2. Click the button for adding properties, located below the standard fields.
3. Name the field and choose its type: text, number, date, selection, relation, tags, checkbox, signature.
4. Save.

The field becomes available on the linked records, and usable as a filter and grouping criterion.

Searching for a contact

Contacts are the most heavily used data in the database.

1. Open the Contacts application.
2. Type a fragment of a name, a company, an email address, a phone number or a tag in the search bar.
3. Choose the field the search should bear on from the list offered.

The groupings offered, by Salesperson, by Company or by Country, quickly give a usable segmentation.

Tracking changes

On sensitive documents, the history of value changes is recorded in the chatter: who changed what, when, and what the previous value was.