Besides large new features – such as Listings and Trends & Charts – the last few months have brought a steady stream of other system improvements. We have just been a little quiet about them. However, they have significantly increased our efficiency in updating or working with the database as well as brought along exciting new functionality. Here, we will focus on four new features which we find the most interesting.
Export
As mentioned in our MyOC post, until recently we were receiving a ton of questions how to export transactions into a Microsoft Excel-friendly format. While this functionality was built in from the beginning as part of the MyOC feature, many people were missing it. We admit, it was not that obvious.
So, a month ago we brought the export functionality out to every single transaction list view. Now – if you are a PRO subscriber – whenever you see a transaction list view, you can select individual transactions by checking the checkbox at the beginning of the transaction row and click the “Export (.csv)” button. And voila, you will have a clean .CSV (comma-separated values) file with full transaction detail downloaded to your computer so you can open it in your preferred spreadsheet editing software.
Keyboard Shortcuts
We are expert Gmail users here at OpenComps. And one thing we really like about that email system is how fast we are able to process large amounts of email due to the excellent keyboard shortcuts support. We wondered aloud whether such super-efficiency can be brought to OpenComps. It turned out with a little help from Mousetrap, this was not that difficult to implement.
Give it a test drive today and increase your OpenComps’ efficiency ten-fold. We have! Just press “?” (that’s Shift+/) and you’ll get a list of the available keyboard shortcuts.
We just love going from the Hotel section (“g h”) to then quickly switch to adding a Multifamily transaction (“a m”) to going back to the Office section (“g o”), jumping into search (“/”) or advanced search (“a /”) and quickly editing a transaction (“e”) when we find the one.
We would love to hear your thoughts on what other keyboard shortcuts you think will add to your efficiency working with OpenComps!
Local Amount and Local Currency
Ok, we know. Our aim is to make any institutional real estate market in the world more open and transparent, but until recently all we cared about was United States Dollars! We still think that one currency stick to measure all worldwide markets is a powerful tool, but we also want to make ourselves a little more world-friendly too.
Introducing Local Amount and Local Currency fields! Now, in addition to recording the transaction in US$, you can record the transaction in 158 currencies as well. World rejoice!
We have ideas to bring this fields even more forward by letting users choose how they view transaction lists (in US$ or local amounts), but that’s for a later day. A local translation of OpenComps’ interface will likely also help with increased global adoption, but, unfortunately, at present we don’t have this skill set. Maybe you can help?
Thousands Separator
Another small, yet with very significant effect on efficiency, improvement was the programming of the Units, Amount and Local Amounts fields to understand input numbers with a thousands separator (“,” only please; sorry U.S.-centric). Gone is the tyranny of ensuring that numbers are entered as 100000000 when it’s much easier with 100,000,000 or even $100,000,000 (in Amount only). We’ve shared your pain. And, pain no more.
So, any other small system improvements that you think we should be working on?