17. MENU, DASHBOARD & DASHLETS T his chapter gives an overview of CiviCRM's dashboard (it's 'home page') and the navigation menu available for people working in CiviCRM.
THE NAVIGATION MENU T he navigation menu is a small bar at the top of every "back office" page of CiviCRM. ... It provides access to nearly every function of CiviCRM and is broadly organised into headings by individual CiviComponents (such as Contributions, Events and Mailings), with a few exceptions for Search and Administer, both of which cover all of the enabled CiviComponents.
T he menu also features a Quick search field for finding contacts. T yping any part of a contact's name or email address into the Quick search field will pull down a list of possible matches that you can click on to go directly to the contact's summary page:
You can modify the navigation menu by going to: Administer > Customize > Navigation Menu and then adding or rearranging menu items on the screen. Remember that changes you make to the navigation menu will be seen by everyone who has the appropriate permissions to see the menu, for better or for worse, so be careful when modifying the navigation menu.
THE DASHBOARD When you first log into CiviCRM, the first page that you will see is the dashboard (CiviCRM Home). T he dashboard allows you to see important information about your site and CiviCRM by displaying a series of "dashlets". A dashlet is a snippet of information about a part of CiviCRM: many dashlets come with CiviCRM by default, and you or your administrator can create additional dashlets that are specific to your organisation's needs. Some examples of dashlets that come with CiviCRM include:
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