The next few posts will be focused on customizing your settings within GoldMine. Now, GoldMine is designed to work well without ever customizing a single setting, and if you’re the kind of person that just wants to use GoldMine without over thinking the process, you’ll be happy to know you don’t need to adjust any settings.

However, if you’re serious about getting GoldMine to really work for you, the best thing you’ll ever do is fine tune your settings!

In this section of the series I’ll walk you through the first step of adjusting your GoldMine settings — customizing your tabs.

As the number of features have increased within GoldMine, the number of defined tabs has increased as well. Originally, GoldMine displayed these tabs horizontally within the GoldMine interface. But now that there’s 18 different tabs such as “Fields”, “GM+View”, “Notes” etc, the tabs have been moved into a drop-down style list on the left side of the interface.

The goal here is to promote the highly used tabs to the first tier of tabs and the lesser used tabs to the second tier. If you’ve been using GoldMine for years, you may know exactly what needs to be on the first tier, but to help the newbies, here’s what I recommend after some 20 years of using GoldMine:

  • Demote the Summary tab to the second tier and replace it with the Links tab
  • Demote the Referrals tab and the Notes tab
  • Promote two tabs that you tend to use most

Customizing Your Tabs: How to Promote or Demote a Tab

  1. Click the down arrow to the left of the tabs. (a drop down box appears)
  2. Click “Customize” at the bottom of the list. (the Display Tabs screen appears)
  3. Highlight the tab you want to promote or demote. (Don’t touch the checkbox to the left of the tab description. Just highlight the name of the tab and then click the “Move Up” or “Move Down” button until the tab is placed where you want it)
  4. Click “Ok” when you’re done customizing your tab positions.

Now you’ve made the most common first step to customizing your user interface, which should lead to improved productivity!