In the Councillor Portal, while viewing Reports or Attachments, use this feature to link text you highlight to your Private Notes, to quickly navigate back to the content of interest.
Prerequisites:
- Access to the councillor portal (https://CLIENTNAME.civicclerk.com.au/boardview/) and permissions to view required Meeting types.
- To use 'Linked Notes', your site needs to be enabled to use the split screen PDF viewer option. If unsure, contact your Governance or Meeting Administrator team.
Tip: Before reading this article on 'Linked Notes', if you have not used the NOTES function in BoardView before, you may find the below article helpful to view first. This explains how to navigate to an Agenda Item and add notes, private to your login, that can easily be located again later.
Brief video demonstrating the Councillor portal 'Linked Notes' feature
1. Once logged in and viewing a specific Agenda Item that includes a Report and related Attachments(if present), click the first attachment in the left-hand pane, in this case the 'Report', to see previewed in the right-hand pane of the screen. See below.
Tip: If you'd like the first Attachment 'Report' to be opened in the Preview pane by default, without having to click on the document first, see the last section of this guide here.
2. To enable note linking with document text, click the Notes button above the preview pane (right-hand-side), see following.
3. While scrolling through the content being previewed, highlight the text you would like to link to a note. See example highlighted selection in this document.
4. Next, click in the Notes (Private) box in the left-hand pane to start entering your notes, a blue box will appear to indicate it is linking to the place you highlighted in the document. Any comments you add here will be auto-saved and private to you only.
5. As you review the other Attachments for that Item, further links between content and notes can be made.
6. When returning to this Agenda Item at a later time, you can quickly navigate back to the area of the report or attachment you were interested in, by clicking on any of the linked note boxes.
7. Alternatively, if you click on text previously highlighted in one of the Item documents, it will show you the related note you made in a red box. See below.
To remove any linked notes, simply delete all text from the note, then press the down arrow on your keyboard to go to the line underneath the note and use backspace to delete the note from the Notes (Private) box.
After removing notes, if text still shows highlighted, refresh the page.
The linking option can be turned off again by clicking the same Notes button above the preview pane, see step (2) above.
ENABLE FIRST ATTACHMENT (REPORT) AUTO-PREVIEW - When navigating into an Item on the Agenda, you can have the first listed attachment, typically the 'Report' document, preview automatically. This avoids the need to click on the document first, to open the Preview window in the right-hand pane. See following steps to enable this option.
- Login to the Councillor portal as per usual
- Click on the top-right user menu, where you'll see your name, then on Account Settings
- In the Account Settings window, under the Board Settings heading, tick the setting Open Attachment Automatically to enable
- Click [Save] button to record your change