Matter Desktop

Introduction

The Matter Desktop allows you to quickly and easily manage your Matters. Unlike TimeMatters Power Views you don't need to know HTML or XML to customize your view of your data. In Houdini it is painless and you don't have to touch your keyboard. You will probably spend most your day working from within the Matter Desktop.

Matter Desktop Menu

At the top of the Houdini desktop you will see three Matter icons. The original Matter Dashboard, Matter Form and Matter Desktop.

Matter Lookup Field

Zoom

When you click the Matter Desktop icon a Matter lookup field will be revealed.
Enter either a Matter ID or a Matter Reference and select one of your Matters.
Nothing will seem to happen at first because you must determine what you want to see when you work with your Matters.

Matter Widget Palette

At the bottom of the screen you will see the Matter Widget palette. Use this palette to place widgets onto the screen.

Matter Widgets

There are seven Matter Widgets. Email, Documents, To-Dos, Events, eDocuments, Notes and Contacts.

1. Click to select an item from the list. double-click to open the record's form.

2. Use these two icons to expand the Matter Widget to full screen and back to its original size.

3. Each Matter Widget has a action palette on the right. Each Widget is different but they all allow you to refresh and add new records. In some cases widgets will have special action icons for example, in the Contact Widget above there are Add Related Matter, Email and Phone Call.

4. Removes the Matter Widget from Matter Desktop presently.

Positioning your Widgets

Once they are onscreen you can position and resize them as you like. The above image is an example with all the Matter Widgets on screen. (The Matter Widgets Palette is not shown but is located at the very bottom of the screen).

You can perform just about every task from within the Matter Desktop. Each widget has its own menu. For example, you can add a related contact right from the Contact Matter Widget.

Each Staff Member can customize their own view. Your preferences will be saved to your profile when you logout.

Viewing a Matter

To view the details of a Matter simply toggle the Matter Desktop and enter your search criteria. You can enter the Matter ID or the Matter Reference into the field.
You don't have to type an exact match. Houdini will suggest as you type.

NOTE: All searches are case Sensitive.

You can do a split partial search across both the Matter ID and Matter Reference fields by separating your search term with a space e.g.

001 Da

Would result in
0011-2 Daniel v. Smith
0012-9 David Arlington Inc.
...

You can also specify that you want to ignore all search fields except the last which in this case it would be the Matter Reference field like so

*Arm

would results in
912-0 Armitron Electronics
884-7 Arms Remington
...

You can also do a word search by placing a percent sign (%) in front of your search criteria for example, "%Bank" or %Jones".

To clear and search for another Matter click the stop icon located to the left of the Mater Lookup field (red arrow).

Hiding the Matter Desktop

The Matter Desktop gets out of the way when you don't need it. You can click the Matter Desktop icon again to toggle the Matter Desktop on and off or you can click the Matter Widget icon located in the Matter Widget palette located at the bottom of the Houdini desktop as shown above.