To the casual observer, blist looks a lot like a visually rich spreadsheet. That’s by design. We want blist to seem familiar despite that under the cover it’s more a web-based database than a web-based spreadsheet. After all, spreadsheets are great for crunching numbers. But databases are much better for storing, finding and analyzing data.
One of the features that makes blist a database is the ability to create, save and execute lenses. A lens is a custom view of your data. A lens can include:
- Optionally a filter - criteria used to select a subset of the rows from the underlying full blist. Here are a few examples:
- Lead Stage = In Closing
- Varietal = Merlot AND Vintage BETWEEN 2003 AND 2005
- Priority = High OR (Age > 90 AND Priority = Medium)
- Opportunity > 1000000 AND Probability of Close = High AND State = CA
If you create a filter, you’ll only see those rows. The rest of the data is still there, it’s just concealed from you while you work through the lens. If don’t create a filter, you’ll see all of the rows.
- Optionally a column list - a subset of the columns that you want to see when viewing your data through this lens. As an example we use blist for our bug tracking system. It has 20 columns including a plain text field to hold the subject and a rich text field where we enter a much lengthier narrative description. Sometimes I just want a quick peek into open bugs so in my lens I hide about 10 of the columns I’m not currently interested in, including the description.
- Optionally a sort order of rows visible through your lens. Perhaps you want to see your sales leads by stage and then opportunity size. Maybe you want to view your open bugs by priority then severity then age. If you don’t specify a sort order the rows are displayed in their natural physical order, which is the order in which they were entered.
The user adoption pattern for lenses is interesting to observe. People operate without lenses for quite a while then all of sudden create dozens of them. I think it’s because there’s a barrier to overcome understanding them, then the lightbulb goes on, and people realize that lenses are a really powerful way to slice through data.
While there are times when going through the effort to create a temporary, disposable lens might make sense, the real power of lenses is that they can be saved, reused and shared. To change my view to any lens for the current blist, I just need to drop down the lens selector:
Hopefully you’re now excited to try lenses for yourself. Let’s make one. We’ll create a lens against the following hypothetical sales pipeline:
To start creating a lens, load up one of your blists then click on the lens builder icon or feel free to borrow the one above. It’s called “Hypothetical Sales Pipeline” and I’ve made it publicly accessible.
Click on the lens builder icon. I’ve circled it in red to show you where it is.
The lens builder has 3 tabs. The first tab is for creating your filter criteria. The second tab is for selecting the columns you want to show and which you want to hide. The third tab is for specifying the sort order.
The first tab - Filter Criteria - is initially empty:
Let’s find all of the leads where the stage is “Active Negotiations” and the opportunity size is greater than or equal to $2,500. Drag and drop the column called “Sales Stage” from the list of columns onto the filter canvas. Leave the condition combo box in the middle set to “Equals” then drop down the values combo box. It’s the rightmost combo box. Notice it has all of the sales stages. Find “Active Negotiations” in the list and select it. Next drag and drop the column “Oppty Size” on to the grid. Notice that an [And] button appears to connect the two conditions. That’s what we want, so leave it alone. (Under different circumstances, we might want either stage = “Active Negotiations” OR opportunity size >= $2,500. In that case we’d just click on the [And] button to flip it to [Or].) We want to change the condition from “Equals” to “Greater than or equal to” and then type in $2,500 into the rightmost field. When you’re done, it should look like this:
We don’t need all of the columns in the output. Let’s just include the name of the company, probability of close, the sales rep, and the opportunity size. Click on the columns tab and move all but those 4 columns from the list of visible columns to the list of hidden columns. You can move them by any of three methods - dragging and dropping, using the left and right arrows in the middle, or double clicking. When complete, it will look like this:
Finally, let’s sort this in descending opportunity size order. Click on the “Sort By” tab. Move the column “Oppty Size” from the unsorted columns list to the sorted columns list. By default columns are sorted in ascending order. We want them to be listed in descending order, so click on the word “ascending” to invert it to “descending” order. It will look like this when you’re done:
We’re almost done. We could click [OK] and see the results and then perhaps discard the lens. But let’s instead give our lens a name in case we want to run this again in the future. Click on the [Save as...] and call it “Active Negotiations” then click [OK]. The lens has been saved by name and the results are displayed. Here’s what the results looks like:
That’s all there is to creating a lens in blist. Remember that a lens is a real-time view of your underlying data. If you load the same lens two days in a row, you will get different results if the underlying data has changed.
If you would like a more visual tutorial, we have a 2-minute blist video that shows you how to create a lens.
