Good morning! Welcome to the time saving customizations webinar for FlexMLS. My name is Amy Long. I’m a trainer for FBS, the makers of FlexMLS. Today we will cover some helpful ways in which you can customize your dashboard, create multiple dashboards, change your dashboard layout, modify dashboard gadgets, and favorite frequently used FlexMLS functions.
Please note that we are joined today by FBS team member Adam, who will be available to answer questions throughout the webinar.
Also note that the webinar is being recorded and will be available to all who signed up within twenty four hours.
You will receive an email with a link to the webinar. So now, we are going to talk about our dashboard. And what I’m going to do is this is our Flex MLS homepage that will bring you directly to your dashboard.
And today I’m using the Fargo area MLS as an example as I go through some of the options that are available to customize dashboard and gadgets and favorites. First of all, I will show you that up in the upper left hand corner, you will see my mouse hovering over a blue Flex MLS toggle. And this will indicate which dashboard I am currently on. Your MLS will provide a dashboard that typically will have information such as commonly used links within your MLS, important messages or notifications, announcements that your MLS would like you to be aware of, and some other gadgets.
Your MLS dashboard is not customizable to you. So you may wonder why would I want to have an additional dashboard or possibly several dashboards because you can customize them. So what I’m going to do is I’ll show you now a couple examples of how we can do that. So I’m gonna go back over to the left hand side here and click on the MLS dashboard. And I’m gonna go down to desktop. And the desktop dashboard is the dashboard I would like to have as my default. And in order to do that, I will go over to the right hand side of the screen and I’m going to click on Customize. Once I click on Customize, I can see that I am under the desktop dashboard and I can choose to make this my default just by clicking make default. So I’m going to do that at this time. This will become my new default dashboard or homepage.
So every time I log in to Flex MLS, this will be the dashboard that populates first. I can always change and go back to my MLS dashboard or any other dashboards I may have, but this is the one that I would like to have as the default. I’m going to talk a little bit about how to create additional dashboards. And I use often, as I’m sure many of you, my iPad or a tablet to use Flex MLS. I would like to create a dashboard specifically with the correct type of layout for my iPad. So what I’m going to do is I’m still over on the right hand side under Customize. When I click on that button, I’m going to indicate that I’d like to add another Dash dashboard.
And I will come down to Add Dashboard under Home and click on it. And this has created an additional dashboard. Now I’d like to do some customization for this. So I’m going to go back over to customize and I am going to change the name of this first of all. I don’t want it to say home. I know that this is what I’m going to want to use when I am utilizing my iPad, so I’m just going to name it iPad and click Save. Now I have a dashboard dedicated to my iPad and I can change the layout to make it more iPad or tablet friendly. So under Customize, I will go to Change Layout and I am currently in a two column layout and I would like just a single one column. This would work well with my iPad or tablet, allow me to scroll and visually see all of the gadgets that I have saved under this dashboard. So now, if I go back to my left hand side, I have my MLS dashboard where I can find the important information that the MLS wants to provide. I have a home dashboard. I have my default desktop and my iPad. There are a few ways I can get back to my default. One is just to simply click over here and click on desktop. Or I can go up to the top and I can click the blue FlexMLS home button and this will take me to my desktop dashboard which is now my default Now, we’re going to talk a little bit about gadgets. I have the layout saved that I like. It’s a three column layout and allows me on a larger screen to see all of my gadgets easily.
As I referenced earlier, I am working within the city of Fargo, Moorhead and West Fargo today, MLS, for demonstration purposes. I’m going to talk about how we can customize the gadgets within our dashboard. The gadgets are the boxes, if you will, that are on your dashboard home screen. I currently have a hot sheet gadget for the City of Morehead and I have a hot sheet gadget for the City of West Fargo. I would like to create a Hot Sheet gadget for the City of Fargo, so I will go up to Customize on the right hand side and am going to, under Desktop, add a gadget. When this screen populates, I have the option to indicate if I wanted to change which dashboard I’d like to use, so I created my iPad dashboard, my desktop dashboard or home. I’d like to keep it under Desktop. And you will notice that the MLS is not an option here. That is because it is not customizable. It is locked down, and that is another reason that you may wish to create multiple dashboards. So, I’m going to go to Daily, and then I’m going to click Add Another Hot Sheet. That Hot Sheet gadget has been added. If I go to the right hand side and just click Return to Dashboard, Now, you will notice I have a new gadget on my dashboard and it is set for a hot sheet. I’m going to click and drag. My mouse will turn into a four prong arrow and that allows me to click and drag and rearrange my gadgets on my dashboard. But as I indicated, I’d like this to be specifically for the City of Fargo. So I’m going to go over to the three dots on the right hand side, and I’m going to click Settings. And I would like to have the City of Fargo, and I am going to indicate the property type as residential for this particular hot sheet and save.
I do realize in many of your versions of Flex MLS, your MLSs, that you will have additional options to filter for Hot Sheets. This is just what is available for this area.
So now I’ve got a Hot Sheet for my three main metro areas in our region here: the City of Fargo, West Fargo, and Morehead. And if I wanted to reorder these in any way, I can click and drag, and I’ve got Fargo first, and then I’ll put Morehead second and West Fargo in third.
Another option we could modify would be the My Listings. And all the gadgets are customizable. I’m just going to show a couple different examples today.
My Listings, if we again click on the three dots on the right side of the gadget, if you are possibly office or admin staff and you don’t have listings of your own but you’d like to be able to see your office listings, you can click on those three buttons and go into settings. Under the My Listings Gadget, we could indicate that we would like My Office Listings instead of My Listings, and then we can save that. Now the title name for the gadget didn’t change, but the content will. So now this will just populate all Office listings. And if we wanted to create an additional gadget showing My Listings in addition to My Office listings, all we would need do is go over to customize and add that gadget as well.
So you can play around with your dashboard, add the gadgets that you feel would be beneficial, and create multiple dashboards depending on what your needs are. So now we’re going to talk about favoriting menu items.
And menu functions are all the functions that are available within Flex MLS to users. When you click on Menu, you will notice a dropdown and all of the functions available will populate. If you run your mouse up and down kind of the side of these functions, you’ll notice a star will populate. And you can favorite items by just clicking on the star. And you will notice I just clicked to Add Listing and then up here in my favorite bar, Add Listing was just included.
So we can add, if we wanted to include the map search, a favorite button for CMA, anything else, an address search. These are all now available up here. And if there’s anything that we maybe decide we no longer use enough to make it a favorite, we could as simply as going into menu and clicking on the Start to remove that item. Additionally, if you wanted to for any reason reorder these, on the right hand side just above the Customize button, we can click on Reorder and we can just click and drag. So these are the functions within the menu that I have selected as favorites at this time. So if I’d like my CMA to be under my Hot Sheet, all we have to do is click and drag these to and if there’s something again that is no longer needed or necessary we can just remove it either under menu with the star or when we’re reordering these favorite functions just click the Remove button.
So now that I have those saved, I have created my default home dashboard and then I have created a second dashboard for my iPad and went over how to favorite your most frequently used Flex MLS functions to be visible in your Favorites bar. And this bar is always visible to you no matter where you are in Flex MLS. If you’re in the middle of a listing, you ‘re doing a search, you’re viewing a property, quite likely multitasking all three, this will always be available and you can have quick and easy access to your most frequently used functions. So that brings us to the end of our very brief webinar over time saving customizations today. Adam again is taking questions. If you have anything that you’d like to ask about, please let him know. I thank you very much for joining today and I look forward to the next opportunity to present a webinar. Thank you.
