DreamConnect S60 Tutorial

Intro: Ways To Manage Categories

DreamConnect allows you to organise your contacts in a way that is practical and meaningful. The Categories feature enables you to classify each contact according to the context in which you interact with it. You can choose to view only those contacts in the relevant category. This is very useful if you want to view or find contacts within a particular area, for example, all the people in your work department or people who you have to sell (or have sold) products to.

A contact can belong to multiple categories, enhancing the ease with which you can find information. This reflects the real-life situation where someone may belong to different areas of your life, for example, someone who is both a friend and a work colleague.

Categories can be organised in a hierarchy. Hierarchies reflect the real-life way we categorise things, dividing them into smaller and more specific chunks, such as business then divided into individual companies, which are then divided into departments, etc.)

Importantly, all categories will automatically include all contacts assigned to them and to any of their subcategories. For example, you have a top level category called Business. Under Business, you have your company Home Designs and under that, Clients and Staff as subcategories. If you add new contacts to Staff, they will also be attached to the Business and Home Designs categories automatically. You can see from the screenshot that the organisation and relationship of your categories are clearly displayed.  This display works both in the category editor, the category menus, and the category selector in the contact editor.

Attaching Categories

Adding and removing contacts is tedious in the standard Contacts. DreamConnect provides multiple ways to do this. You can add or remove multiple contacts to and from categories in the contact list view. This makes moving many contacts between categories an easy task. You can also add or remove contacts from categories in any of the contact views available. Whether you are viewing a list of contacts, the details of a particular contact or editing a contact’s details, you can simply select the categories that you want the contact to attach or detach from, as in this screenshot.

Suppose you had a work colleague whom you now also consider a friend. You want to place this person in the Personal category. There are two methods to do this:

• In the contact list with the contact highlighted (and no contacts marked), select Options > Add to cat. and choose the category to be attached to the contact.
• In the edit contact view, scroll to the category field and select the category.

Let’s say you've decided that the first option is the most convenient. The following screenshot shows how simple it is to perform this action.

Detaching the categories is equally easy and the technique is identical to the above two methods. In the first method, instead of choosing Add to cat., choose Remove from cat.

Creating New Categories

You may create new categories to suit your needs. For example, if you wanted to put all the people who are soccer fans together:

1. First, from the contact list choose Options > Categories > Edit categories and a list of categories and subcategories appear.
2. On the same screen, select Options> Add and a category dialogue box appears.
3. Choose Personal as the Parent category, then enter Soccer as the new category. Press Ok to return to the main display.

Viewing Categories

As opposed to groups in the standard Contacts, categories are treated as part of a contact’s information. That means you can see the categories a contact belongs to when viewing or editing contact details, not just from the group view.

In the latest S60 E Series phones such as E71, groups are hard to find because they are scattered through the contact list. In this case, DreamConnect allows you to see a list of all your categories at a glance, saving you the need to remember and search for particular categories. You can see the list of categories when viewing a list of contacts.

For example, you may want to call all your soccer friends to get together and watch a match. Categories is extremely useful for situations in which you need to contact a number of people within a particular group.

The top of the screen always reflects the category that you are currently viewing. This is part of DreamConnect’s constant visual feedback to keep you informed of what you are viewing.

Unfiled Categories

Another aspect of DreamConnect’s category management worth mentioning is its ‘Unfiled’ category. It contains every person that is not assigned to a category. This is handy for when you want to see your contacts in the context of their categorisation. You can easily and quickly see who is in which categories without the need to check every contact or category to find out. Imagine going through 300 contacts to check their category status, and you’ll realise how significant this unfiled category can be.

Managing Categories

Categories are easily managed and edited. For instance, if you wanted to delete a certain category, simply select Options > Categories > Edit Categories on the contact list. You can create, modify, delete or select a category to view.  This screenshot shows how you can move a category about the hierarchy by renaming it.

As shown, Categories is extremely useful, and very easy to operate. This feature is invaluable for people who want flexibility and convenience in organising their contacts.

Example: Steps To Set Up Categories

DreamConnect is the first contacts application on Symbian smartphones that allows you to categorise your contacts in a hierarchy, which better reflects the real life relationships contained in your contact database.

Hierarchical categories are a great way to categorise contacts both generally and specifically. This tutorial will demonstrate how set up hierarchical categories quickly and accurately using other tools in DreamConnect, such as global find.

1. Set up your hierarchical categories

2. Do a Global Find

This Global Find is simply to find every contact that has the company field that contains the detail "alpha" (case sensitive). This is just an example, and Global Find can be used to narrow or widen the search to include other search results, depending on how general or specific your search criteria is in the Global Find.

3. Select all

If there are a few exceptions, you can go through making the exceptions, then choose Invert marks to choose everything but those initially marked.

4. Add to category

The Add to cat. command (and remove from cat.) make it very easy to move many contacts between categories.

5. Choose category whenever needed

Note that these same categories are now also present in the Business category as well, without having to manually add them.