SmartSuite Tour for Beginners: How to Use Solutions, Apps, & Records

In this video, I'm going to break down the SmartSuite hierarchy, explain how it all comes together, and I'm going to try to do so in the most beginner friendly way possible. I will sprinkle in a few software comparisons for those of you who are a bit more tech savvy. But I'm hoping this will be digestible by the masses to make that possible. We're going to be explaining the hierarchy today by using some metaphors, some examples based on pen and paper organization that I hope will help you understand and remember the jargon inside the SmartSuite universe. Okay, that's our roadmap for today. By the end of this video, I'm hoping you can walk away and say aha. I get it. I understand both how SmartSuite comes together and where to start my day in SmartSuite. That's our goal for today. Before we go into the metaphors and start exploring, I want to say a quick thank you to SmartSuite for sponsoring this channel. They supported this content, so you guys get it for free. Join me in saying thank you. Leave a comment below and and of course Also check out SmartSuite for yourself using the affiliate link below this video in that description area if you'd like to say thanks. All right, so let's dive in to our story here and start off with a little piece of paper. So let's imagine we have a piece of paper, and on that piece of paper we want to record some tasks we need to do. Well, it would probably make sense if we write down those tasks right? One after another after another. And if there is a certain deadline we need to finish these tasks by, we'd probably put those next to the actual task names. So things we need to do and when we need to do it, we could maybe make some lines to organize this a bit more. Maybe we even want to add some more data by adding some more columns for things like what is this for? Or how important is this? But ultimately that's how we would make a to do list on a piece of paper that makes sense right now. Nothing too shocking there, right? There's nothing that, you know, mind blowing about a to do list. Well, let's throw in one more example here. Let's say one of your to do list items is to send birthday cards. Hmm, that one's a little tricky. You might want to be able to track what birthdays you need to send cards about. Right? Whose birthday is it? And that might bring us to a separate piece of paper. We might want A piece of paper where we just list all of the birthdays so that we can reference it when we need to do that task later. Makes sense again, right? Grab a piece of paper, list all the birthdays, a column for all the dates, a column for when we need to put it in the mail. Whatever we want to track, we could put it on this. Each of these things that we're trying to record would be a row on this new piece of paper to track all of these birthdays. And because birthdays and tasks are kind of separate things, we would have them on separate pieces of paper. Both of these pieces of paper are hubs of information that I can use to apply that that'll make sense later to apply to a particular challenge that I'm trying to solve. These two things in this case, might be helping me solve the problem of personal life organization. Okay, you still with me? Cool. So these two things together create a solution to a problem I am facing. Well, how do I keep these two pieces of paper together? One example, and what we're going to use for this metaphor is let's put them inside a bag. And just to keep them waterproof, right? We'll put them inside a Ziploc, put them in there, and this is going to be our personal life organization solution. Baggie. It's not the cutest thing, but it gets the job done. Inside this bag, I can shift things around or contort the pages so I can only see certain things. Due to the bag size, I can only see one page at a time. Unless we start folding things in a really weird way, which requires a little bit of ninja skill. Now, this is the metaphorical way of understanding SmartSuite. Okay, let me translate this over. Because we live in the 21st century, right? Writing down pieces of paper and shoving them in Ziploc bags and carry them to the work conference room might get you some side eyes. It might be a little unusual. So instead, we can implement the same method, the same kind of solution inside a piece of software that we can access anywhere, that we don't have to worry about spilling coffee on and that we don't have to look strange carrying under our arm as we walk down the hallway. That's where SmartSuite comes in. In fact, let's just go inside SmartSuite and I'll show you how this exact same offline structure can apply inside the tool. P.S. if you want to follow along with this portion of the tutorial, use the affiliate link below this video, sign up for free, and then you can actually click along with me as we go through this next step. All right? Okay. All right. So despite how sexy SmartSuite looks here, right, like this fancy, glossy, millennial looking online tool, this really is not that different than the plastic baggie we just talked about. Except, you know, less embarrassing to bring into a conference room. Inside of our home. In SmartSuite, we see any of the plastic bags of stuff that we have brought with us. These plastic bags are solutions. That's the term for them inside of SmartSuite, and that's how we can think about them. It's an area, it's a theme, it's a problem we are trying to solve. That is what our solution is. And again, it's just like our Ziploc bag. When we look inside the Ziploc bag, we can only see one piece of paper at a time. We see our task management paper and we see our stay in touch birthday reminders piece of paper. These two pieces of paper are called apps in SmartSuite. So these apply get it Apps. That's why I said it would make sense later. These apply to a certain area of the problem we're trying to solve. As we put together apps and apps and more apps, we can create a solution get it Solution apps. That's our hierarchy here. Each of these is kinda just like a piece of paper. Now, unlike a piece of paper, because this is a digital tool and not just a written piece of paper, we have some additional options that we would not otherwise have, such as the ability to change how these pieces of paper look automatically. For example, I can go over here and change the way the piece of paper is laid out. Not change the information, just the layout to any format that I prefer, such as maybe a visual card view, maybe a Kanban view, maybe a map view. For some reason, if I want to know people's locations, a calendar view and so on, I can choose any layout for my piece of paper without adjusting any of the actual data. In addition to this, I can save those alternative layouts. For example, maybe on this piece of paper. In this moment, it's really important for me to see anything related to Chris. Chris is just the best man. I just want to see everything around Chris on here. So I could say, hey, whenever an event contains the word Chris, highlight it in orangeish yellow. Canary yellow. That really looks like orange to me. But whatever, here we are. We can have this set up and I have this setting where it's kind of spotlighting a piece of information and I can go ahead and save this layout as my Chris only view, right? If I'm like, I need to know all things Chris, I can have a Chris view and then I could create another view that has different settings. This is just like taking that same piece of paper and folding it in different ways. Except because it's technology, we can have the paper folded in different ways and just save it so we can go back to those different ways. So perhaps on this page I want to highlight all things that contain Sierra, because Sierra is awesome. She deserves to be highlighted in, let's say, black every time. There's something about Sierra. And this could be my Sierra view. Now, this is kind of a silly use for views, but I hope you can see the example here. If I click on the Chris view, it's always going to highlight all Chris things. And if I go on the Sierra view, it shows me all Sierra things. I am basically allowing myself to fold and adjust and highlight this page right this, this app. But imagine it being a piece of paper in a bunch of different ways without messing up the original information and not having to erase and rewrite or any of that stuff. That's kind of how SmartSuite equates back to that pen and paper method. We've got our pieces of paper, our different ways of folding and seeing information, and of course, all the power of a piece of technology. And before we move on here, I want to highlight one other comparison point between the pen and paper method and smartsuite. Do you see how we have these kind of column headers, you know, task assignee, status, due date. But over on this view, we have things like event and status and who's going to the event and all this stuff. These columns are something that we can customize, just like on our piece of paper, where we have the columns and we could add a header. Same thing in SmartSuite. We can just double click on any of these headers and change the name to be parties or festivities. If I could spell whatever we want them to say, we, we can update these fields just like we could on the piece of paper. Once we update them to whatever we want it to say, we could say this due date to send card. Maybe it will update in the interface and show exactly how we want to show, just like when you add a column header on your piece of paper. Now, once we've gotten to that point, we've started to max out where the similarities between paper and software are. At this point, SmartSuite can start doing more than just what our piece of paper can do. So let's transition over and dive into what that means inside SmartSuite. Because it's not a piece of paper, we have the option to zoom in. Right. You ever have a sticky note where you're writing a note to yourself and you find yourself smushing and smushing the words smaller and smaller and smaller to try to fit all the words on the page? Yeah. SmartSuite being a piece of software allows us to not have to do that. In fact, if we wanted to go and make this task name super, super long and you know, there's just so many letters it smushes in here, we, we have the option in SmartSuite to expand information and see it all in its long form glory. We even have the ability to write full on descriptions inside the records themselves. Yes, that means these things, these rows, because they can mean anything. SmartSuite just calls them records to say that they're recording something. But they don't have to be a task, they don't have to be a birthday. They can be whatever you choose. But whatever you choose them to be, you can open them to add more details. You don't have to smush it all into the task title. You can write your story into the description, including with formatting, and add all of your text into one place that you can expand to even be a full page area. So unlike that sticky note or piece of paper where you're Cramming everything in SmartSuite gives us a lot of space to expand here and even format this information in a way that suits our brain. I could even give this name, a section like More Details and have it collapse. So I have this expanding area to go into more and more details without having to cram it all on that sticky note or into that little 1 inch by 1 inch box I have on my piece of paper inside these records we also have the option to add more fields. So you know how on a piece of paper we had our columns and we have those replicated here. But we can go so much further because this is a piece of software. We could have fields for what priority level the party is like how important is it to us or the task. We could have custom fields for how much effort it's going to take in order to go to the party. You know, introvert problems. I've only got so much energy. How much energy is this party going to take? We could have currency fields, phone number fields, email fields. We can add pretty much any kind of field we could imagine into this task. So maybe it's something like a voting column. Here, and whether we want to have that field, that piece of data, visible as a column. So if we want to show that here at a glance, we can do that, or we can have it hidden and only tucked inside the record itself. We have those options now that we're inside a digital tool and not just shoving everything on a piece of paper. Now, there's a lot more I could talk about here in terms of what we can do to add more power into these, you know, little. I don't know what we want to call these, like glorified sticky notes, these giant record modals here, but over here on the right is the last thing I really want to highlight here on this beginner tour, which is comments. Yes, it's great to have your piece of paper with your task list, but wouldn't it be better if you could type a message to others and share your task list with them? Exactly. In SmartSuite, you can use the commenting feature on every single record in order to communicate with other members, groups of members, or whoever else you want to tag in comments. It almost becomes like an instant messenger or a text message chain between you and anyone else you have inside your SmartSuite account. Once you have all of your comments accruing here, you. You can collapse them at any point if you wouldn't work by yourself, or maybe assign things out to other people based on what you talk about. But you always have this spot in order to discuss what you're working on and get help if you need it. Or even go up here to the action history to see the exact time log of every single thing that has happened to this record since it was created. That is really handy and a nice way to make sure that unlike that piece of paper that could float anywhere, you you know exactly where each thing that you need to do stands and where it stood in the past. Okay, so that was a lot. We talked about plastic baggies and how we can switch that into SmartSuite and how to use the basic SmartSuite Record features. But if you are getting a little lost right now, or if you're like, lady, please stop talking. I just want to go and look at things. Just a gentle reminder here that the affiliate link for SmartSuite is in the description below. Click it. Check out the fancy features for free on your own if you want to dig into this in a bit more detail. But if you're okay, I'm going to continue guiding you through some of these if you're up for it. All right, so what I thought would be Appropriate Next. You know, now that we've gotten the basics down, is to highlight just a few more features that are unique to the software that might help you when it comes to navigating all of this stuff and knowing how to start your day inside SmartSuite, if you want to give it a shot. So the things we're going to focus on here are just the top half of the screen, the stuff that we haven't quite hit on. Up in the Top left is SmartSuite's logo, or your logo if it's white labeled. When you click up here, it will take you back into that main homepage where you can see all your plastic baggies, AKA solutions. So if you ever are lost, you're scared, you're like, oh my gosh, where am I? Know that you can always click up there to find your way back to the familiar spot of home. Next to that is the search bar. The reason I want to highlight this is because I don't know about you, but sometimes on a Friday, I do things, I type things, I create things, and then I forget, come Monday, I'm a little lost and I'm like, I was doing something with Chris something. Ah, there it is. By knowing where the search bar is, you can ensure nothing is ever lost. Because unlike those sticky notes piled on the corner of your desk that we are all guilty of probably doing, unlike that, this digital information is all searchable, whether it's a file, a comment, whatever else. When you create information inside of SmartSuite, it is searchable and allows you to find it later, even if you don't know where you're looking. So that is the search feature. I'm going to exit out of this and move on. Good with me. You still with me? Okay, cool. So once you click this check mark, you will see all of your open assignments. And I know you're probably thinking, wait, assignments. We've been talking about records and solutions. What the heck are assignments? Well, assignments are smart. Sweet. Trying to be smart. They're trying to recognize any time you've set, you know, assignees assignments, meaning it's assigned to you. They want to help you see that assignment in one spot. SmartSuite wants to give you one location for all of those assignments assigned things, so you can see them all in one spot and organize them by whatever detail is most important to you, such as due date, priority solution, or so on. Once you have items in here, you can start working on them by changing the status to say, hey, you know, this is almost done, or this is Done. And that will remove things from your open assignments and move it into your closed assignments. Get it? This is kind of like a summary list to save you from having to go look through all the pieces of paper you might have and just show you the summary of the important tasks that you have created in some area of the interface, regardless of where it's at. That is what my work this little check mark icon is all about. Now, right to the right of this we have the notification center. I'm going to briefly just explain this. If you were working with other people, you will get notified here to say, hey, so and so tagged you in something. So and so posted a comment. If you're using those commenting features, that's where this will show up. And on the left side of the check mark we have starred, which is kind of like our bookmarks bar. You know, use that on your browser where you have like your favorite things that you can click on and it takes you right there. That's what start items are. If there's a piece of paper that you want to reference frequently, if there's an area you need to look at all the time, rather than having to click around and go find it, or you search and look it up, you can add it into your start items here. So you can find it in just one click. It'll take you there no matter where you are in SmartSuite, no matter what you're looking at, clicking on those start items will take you in to that particular section view, what have you. So that concludes this SmartSuite beginner tour. Hopefully this clicked for you. If not, or if you'd like to go deeper, go check out the affiliate link we have for SmartSuite in the description below, where you can trial this tool for yourself and really get a sense of whether it works for the way your brain likes to work. If you'd like to see me go deeper into this tool, talk about some intermediate or some advanced stuff around this topic, please write part two in the comments below. Okay, Part two. Just write that as a comment and I will know that you want us to go deeper on this. If I don't hear from you, we might not produce any more content on this. So your voting is really, really important here to help us know whether this content is helpful or just not helpful. We're trying our best here. All right, I need your help on that. So thank you guys so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.