When reviewing a bill, you may find you’d like to make some notes for yourself, or add some comments you’d like to share with others. BillTrack50 allows you to make both private and public comments on your bill sheets by adding columns via our template manager. Based on customer comments and requests, we’ve just expanded this functionality substantially.
Adding columns to your templates has now become a two step process. By adding this extra step we’ve unlocked several new benefits. You can now have an unlimited number of columns, you can have columns of different types, such as numbers or your own drop down list of options, you can now combine bill sheets using different templates and get sensible results, and you can keep your comments on bills better synced between bill sheets.
Let’s look at the new process for setting up a custom column.
Creating a Custom Column
All of the magic starts in the account menu.
If you have permission to modify templates for your company, you will have a new Manage Columns choice in your account menu. If you created your account you automatically have access to templates and columns. If you were invited to join a company account, and don’t see this menu choice, you’ll need to contact the person who handles BillTrack50 accounts for your company and have them add template administrator permissions to your account.
Choosing Manage Columns will bring up the new Column Manager screen. This is where you create columns that you can use on any template. Setting up columns to be shared between templates is particularly useful for our new drop down list column. You can set up a list of categories, or industries, or your own nuanced positions (or anything else you can think of) just once, and then use that list on any template where you need it. Your list will also be available to other people in your company for them to add to their bill sheets too (assuming they have permission).
The Column Manager shows you all of your available columns. For the system columns you can edit Column Header Text, in case you want to change the label for that column to make it more meaningful to you. To add your own columns, use the red button at the top. And of course the Column Manager will let you edit columns you’ve already added, and remove ones you don’t need any more. (When converting your existing template over to this new system we had to make some assumptions about your columns. If you don’t like how we have your custom columns set up, particularly if you’d like us to combine two different columns like “notes” and “comments” into one single column, please contact us and we can do that with you over the phone.) Clicking on Add Company Column or one of the Edit links for a User Column will take you to the Column Editor.
On this screen you choose the type of column you want, and give it a name. You’ll be able to change the name later, but not the type. (All of your existing columns were made into Text Columns, again, please contact us and we can change them into the types you want.)
Text, Number, and Date are fairly self explanatory. The point of choosing a number column, perhaps for something like priority, is two fold. First, it will make sure anyone entering data in that column enters a number. And second, it will allow you to sort the column in actual number order. Same thing for dates.
The URL Link column is if you’d like to add a link, which can be very helpful if you are wanting to share additional information with your readers. You can link to pages you’ve set up with more information, for example, or perhaps you’d like to link to the official version of the bill on the state legislature site, or link to the bill sponsor’s website if you’d like your readers to contact them. The URL Link Column gives you two things to fill in, the actual link, and then the link text you’d like to actually appear in the column.
Finally, the Dropdown Column type is how you can create your own list of items. When you make this column you’ll also get the chance to enter the items you would like appear in the list. You can edit these items later, adding and removing items as needed.
To add items to the list, simply type the text you would like to appear, including spaces, and then hit enter. To remove items from your list just click the little x in the box for the item you no longer need.
That’s all there is to creating columns. Add a column, give it a name and choose the appropriate type, and your’e good to go. That’s the new first step, from here using templates is pretty much the same as it used to be. But as a refresher, let’s look at the rest of the process.
Adding a Column to a Template
The template manager looks much the same as it did before, with a few improvements. You still access the template manager from the account menu, again assuming you have permission to work with template. You’ll see all of the available system columns and all of your user columns listed for you to choose from. Note you can no longer set the column names here, you have to set column names in the new column manager.
For each template you decide which columns should be visible by checking the visible checkbox. For your custom columns we remind you what data type you set for your columns to help you choose the right ones. You also can decide how wide you want the column to be in the Width box. Finally you can change the order of the columns by grabbing the traction box in the first column and moving the column to where you want it to be.
When you have your template like you want it, save it. If you want this template to be your default whenever you create a new bill sheet, check the default box at the bottom. Checking this box won’t affect any existing bill sheets or stakeholder pages, it will only affect things you create from now on.
Using Your Template and Columns on a Bill Sheet
Applying a template to a bill sheet remains the same. Either choose the template you want when you are first creating the sheet, or go to the manage tab and change the template at any time. For more information on how to do this, and for a run down of the system columns, see this old post about templates (ignoring the obviously outdated sections).
Other Places You Can Use Your Templates
Setting a template affects the columns you have available to you when you are working with bills on your bill sheets. But you can also use templates to affect what columns other people see when you are sharing information with them.
Stakeholder Pages
Stakeholder Pages are for sharing a bill sheet with others, either publicly or privately. When setting up a stakeholder page you have the option of choosing a template, which doesn’t have to be the same template you use when you are viewing the bill sheet. You might want to share a smaller (or larger) number of columns with your readers, or not include some of your notes columns in the public view. Simply set up a template reflecting what you’d like to share, and then choose that new template when creating your stakeholder page.
Map Widget
Much like Stakeholder Pages, our new map widget lets you choose which columns of information you would like to share when you create a map. For a map in particular you might want to share a smaller number of columns, to keep the experience neat and tidy for your readers. You can use any of your templates when you create the map, or even make a brand new template with your map in mind. Then go to the widget tab of your bill sheet, choose the map widget from the widget selector, and choose which template you want before pushing the generate script button. If you change the template the changes will be reflected on your website immediately. If you want to change which template you are using, however, you’ll need to male that change and then generate the script again.
Combine Bill Sheets
One other place templates come into play is if you need to combine several bill sheets into one big report. Now that we know which column is which, we can let you combine bill sheets from any template, into any template, and show you the correct information.
The combine screen still reminds you which template you are using on each bill sheet, but it no longer limits you to choosing bill sheets using all the same template. You can choose any template you like to see your combined data. If you choose the all rows option from the retrieve choices we will add a column to your report containing the bill sheet name.
Keeping Comments in Synch Between Bill Sheets
You may want to keep your comments on bills in synch between different bills sheets. For example, if you choose a position on a bill on one bill sheet, you may want that position to show up everywhere else you are tracking that bill. You’ve always been able to move comments with a bill when you are adding it to another bill sheet, but now we’ve added a button for you to copy all the comments on a bill sheet to all other bill sheets all at once. To use this feature, finish setting your position and making other comments on as many bills as needed, and then go to the manage tab of the bill sheet. You’ll see a new button towards the bottom of the screen:
This button will copy all custom column data on all bills on this bill sheet over to everywhere else the bills appear. The custom data on this bill sheet will override any custom data on your other will sheets, regardless of the template you are using for either bill sheet. For example, if you have made the position column of this bill sheet visible, the position information will be moved to all other bill sheets, even if they don’t have the position column visible on some of those other sheets. If you ever turn on the position column on one of those other bill sheets, the positions of the bills will already be filled in and will show up immediately. Be careful with this, though. If you have a comments column invisible on this bill sheet, and thus you haven’t filled in comments, pushing the synch button will overwrite any comments on the other bill sheets with blank comments from this bill sheet.
We suggest one good strategy is to keep one sheet as your “master” sheet and always push comments from that one sheet to all your others, and don’t use synch from your other sheets. However, feel free to use this new feature however makes sense for you. Call or write if you have any questions about how the synch is going to work for you in your specific situation. We also keep nightly backups so if you accidentally overwrite data, and you didn’t want to, just contact us the as soon as you can and we should be able to get you back to where you were.
Converting To The New System
If you were already using templates extensively, please take a moment to review your columns. We will be happy to work with you to change data types, combine columns that you think of as the same column, or otherwise tweak your columns and templates to exactly how you want them. If you like these new features but need some help setting them up, we’re also here for you. Contact Us any time.
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.
For a quick walk through of the new features, see this 2 minute video: