Context Specific Left Hand Menu

I see you have introduced quick links for the left hand side menu.

I do not want to use these but want the original list of items restored.

How do I do this?

Hi @barry

The original left hand menu has been replaced with the customisable version to make it more useful for users. The original menu is no longer available. Every link that was on the left hand menu is accessible using the top horizontal menu.

If there are some particular links you use often, you can now add them to your left hand menu if you wish to do so.

If there’s a link you can’t find, please let us know and we’ll point you in the right direction

The ones I need are Nominal Ledger, Journal Entries, Previous Journal Entries

Hi Barry

All these can be found under Reports on the top menu. If you navigate to these pages and then click ‘Add link’ on the left hand menu, you’ll be given the option to add a link to your current page.

There’s a new guide on this here:
http://community.quickfile.co.uk/t/menu-customisation/12673#2

As always, if you need further help, please ask :slight_smile:

Please put this back, it was consistent between users and we had procedures for users that used these. I would consider other alternative systems if you make we redo all these procedures.

Why were the users not consulted on this one.

John

Hi @jvanhoof

I’ve closed your other thread to continue the discussion here.

The menu has been made responsive as a step to make our software mobile friendly.

There was a topic started back in April which is where we first mentioned the introduction of customisable links and there was only positive feedback from our users. You can find the topic here.

All links that were down the left hand side are all accessible using the horizontal menu, and we’re more than happy to help you find these links if you have trouble locating ones you used to use.

The main administrator can also add links for all users. When you add a link to the left hand menu, you’ll see this option:

This adds it to the left hand menu of all team members on your account.

If you need any help using this feature, we’re here to help - please let us know.

I totally disagree with this change, I have about 4 premium accounts with you for 3 charities and my own business and the charities are volunteer only organisations which means I have created at my costs procedures to make this work for an ever changing set of treasurers etc.

You have now changed this which means I have a lot of work and training to make this happen and it means that I will probably loose 1 or 2 treasurers which means I will have to do a lot of work finding others. This change is significant and I do not really feel fair for small businesses and charities.

You already went from a free model to cost in the last couple of years, you are really driving me to stop helping charities as a business or go away from quickfile.

John

In my view, this is an absurd change. Is it deliberately designed to annoy users? (I can see that you’re choosing to close the topic after 24 hours, so clearly you don’t want a broad discussion too.)

Let’s face it, the Quickfile layout is nowhere near mobile friendly, I don’t see evidence of the sort of framework needed to support this. More to the point, who needs the full accounts package on a 5" screen?

Why, oh why did you not reproduce the current (previous) left menu using the customiser and make that the default? That way you don’t annoy existing customers yet add to the functionality.

Please, please, please have a mini u-turn and come up with a better and less clumsy solution.

I appreciate your feedback although I’m really struggling to see the argument for having a menu in the left hand column that duplicates options in the top menu? Also as @QFMathew mentions there is a lengthy discussion about these changes here, where we discuss the rationale and attempt to reach some sort of consensus.

Right now you have a system that gives you 100% flexibility over what links you have in your left hand menu. If you wanted the menu to resemble what was there before it can be achieved. if you wish we can even create a template menu for you that resembled the original menu? You can then edit/extend this as you wish.

it won’t be context sensitive to the screen shown, or are you saying it will… if so, great, can I have all the menus back how they were, I can give you all the 4 premium accounts this would have to be done to.

John

Any new support post defaults to a 24 hour close, that’s just how the forum is configured. If it’s a feature request it won’t have an auto close. I will switch to a feature request so it remains open.

@simonmaddox what exactly are you having difficulty accessing since the change? For those pages that you frequently accessed via the left hand menu have you considered adding them into the new customisable menu?

it will be different shortcuts for different users, Glen, so I can’t be specific.

Is there any reason why you can’t make the default left menus the same as the previous version? Is it, as John mentions, that the context (page) sensitive feature has been dropped?

It will not be context sensitive, we can only create a single menu for the account. Any imported template would be based on the dashboard, which does cover most of the context specific options. You can always add additional links to the menu for specific routines.

@simonmaddox

It was an option to develop a context specific feature but it really makes the menu system more complicated to manage. Right now you simply navigate to the page you want to add to the menu and click the “Add link” button. For context specific menus you’d need an entirely separate interface to manage all the sub-menus. Also the QuickFile system isn’t so huge that you really need content specific options. You can easily add all key areas to the single menu that would put you one click away from almost any page.

I understand what you’re saying, Glen, but don’t agree with it. In most apps the likely next steps change depending on where you are, what you are doing. If you thought it was acceptable to just have a single list of shortcuts surely you would have done that in the first place. It’s about guiding people to the likely next actions or related actions, which by nature is context sensitive. I appreciate customisable shortcuts, but not at the cost of losing the context related links.

Hi @simonmaddox

Are you able to provide some examples of links that you feel would be useful on other pages please? We may be able to suggest other ways of trying to achieve what you’re doing.

Also, we do support keyboard shortcuts which could help. There’s a list of shortcuts here

From the example you have given me I think you are missing the point. Keyboard shortcuts don’t point you to related actions (and they don’t even work for all users, only paid accounts). If you are using the system a lot they may speed things up, but I would suggest they are aimed at a more “power user” than an occasional user. I just want context sensitive links back - customisable if you like!

Apologies if you think I’m missing the point - I’m just trying to help find an alternative method.

What links do you feel are missing? What do you feel that you used to use a lot but are no longer there?

As I said above, I’m happy to suggest alternative ways to make this easier for you.

All we can do now is gauge feedback, if this is something users are overwhelming in favour of we can look at a solution.

I personally am against context-specific menus for the previously mentioned reasons. Most accounting systems I’ve used don’t even have a left hand menu so I’m not 100% clear how much of a problem this would be if you’d had no prior experience with the old menu layout. I do appreciate that moving things around that people have become accustomed to does cause some frustration, but I still believe this was a worthwhile change given that now you can add any internal or external link you like to the menu. We have received positive feedback about this change too.

Looking at the HTML of the menus, it’s something like this:

<ul>
  <li class="m-header" id="item_400">Bank accounts</li>
  <li class="m-item" id="item_401">...</li>
  <li class="m-item" id="item_402">...</li>
  <li class="m-header" id="item_403">Purchase invoices</li>
  <li class="m-item" id="item_404">...</li>
  <li class="m-item" id="item_405">...</li>
</ul>

Each heading and item gets a unique ID, and since the body has a different class on each page it would be possible to hide particular items on particular pages with custom CSS rules like:

.page-bank-index #item_403,
.page-bank-index #item_404,
.page-bank-index #item_405
{
  display: none;
}

@Glenn, if the HTML could be enhanced to use nested lists for the sub-sections, e.g.:

<ul>
  <li class="m-header" id="item_400">...
    <ul>
      <li class="m-item" id="item_401">...</li>
      <li class="m-item" id="item_402">...</li>
    </ul></li>
  <li class="m-header" id="item_403">...
    <ul>
      <li class="m-item" id="item_404">...</li>
      <li class="m-item" id="item_405">...</li>
    </ul></li>
</ul>

then you could hide a whole section with a single CSS selector.

1 Like

Hi Glen,
I can’t find ‘Document Manager’ from the drop down menus - can you help please?
thanks
Sue