THE UTILITIES MENU
The Utilities Menu has a bunch of tiny tools to help us enter data faster. We do a lot of copying and pasting from venue websites, Facebook pages, and Google, so we built the Utilities Menu to help speed up that specific task. For the most part each item is pretty self-explanatory, but we’ll list the items here just to be thorough.
PASTE INTO… _________ FIELD
The top few are simple shortcuts to paste data we’ve copied (from a website, email, text doc, or whatever…) into a specific field. The Utility Menu pastes whatever you’ve last copied into your clipboard using the Copy command on your device. However, it also does a couple cool things in the background that you may not notice as it does them. First, it strips out any text formatting like font color, size, underlining, italics, that sort of thing. This can be super helpful when we’re copying an email address off a venue website that uses white text on a black background for example. The tool also strips away leading or trailing spaces or returns that we might’ve selected by accident as we copied the Facebook link for example. We’ve found using the Utilities Menu is a lot faster than having to click in the field, paste the data, change the formatting, check for spaces and returns, all those things.
PARSE GOOGLE MAP INFO
The “Parse Google Map Info” tool works like this: When you do a search in Google for a venue, the Google Place data that usually shows up on the right hand side of a Google search. If you highlight and copy that section from the top of the venue name down through to the end of the phone number and then click the “Parse Google Map Info” selection, the street, city, sate, zip, country, and phone number get pasted into the appropriate fields all in one shot. This currently works for addresses in the USA, Canada, UK, and Germany. Here’s a 3 minute video showing how this works.
REMOVE TEXT FORMATTING
This tool removes all the text formatting in all the fields on the current screen. Sometimes we paste things into a field without using the Paste Into… tools, and in that case we use this tool to remove the text formatting if we want to. This has been really nice when we’re copying gig details into the Notes field from an email that the booker sent us for example, or when we copy the weekly music schedule from a venue’s website so we’ll remember what nights they have music when we go back to book a show there a year from now, that sort of thing. Again, this is particularly great when a venue formats their website with white text on a black background, or some other similar color scheme.