Little-known FogBugz Features
Here are five useful features in FogBugz that you might not know about.
1 - Snippets
Snippets are a way of inserting chunks of prepared text using just a couple of keystrokes. You can use them for all kinds of things like replying to common questions, explaining your return policy, or pointing someone to a technical resource.
Why type the same text over and over again, when you can do a little work upfront and save yourself a ton of time in the long run? If you answer the same question three times, then take a second and make a snippet.
How to use it
By default you type a keyword that you’ve defined and then
without a space type the backtick key, like this, “install`”.
Go to My Settings -> Snippets to get to the configuration page. Then you Create New Snippet, give it a title (the text you will type to activate the snippet) and put your text in the area that says replacement text. Then you’re all set.
Snippets are useful for anything that you have to type over and over again. Just compose your answer once, and let your snippets handle the work.
2 - Enter estimates from the gridview
Instead of going all the way into a case to enter an estimate for it, you can do it right from the gridview of FogBugz (the gridview is the view showing a list of cases where you probably spend a lot of time). You just need to make sure that you have the Estimate (current) column selected in your view, and then click on the case (row) in that column that you want to enter an estimate for, and you got a little pop-up window so you can enter your estimate.
This lets you make a bunch of cases quickly all at once for a project or a sprint, and then enter estimates right there instead of individually editing each case, which would take a lot longer.
3 - Tags
FogBugz has tags and they work like any other tag system to let you easily categorize content and find it later. You simply need to enter the tag you want when you’re in the edit mode of a case.
Pretty straightforward so far. But here are two things you may not know. First, in order to find all items with a specific tag, you can do a search for them. In the search box just type, “tag:callback” and this will return all references to anything tagged “callback.”
Second, you can see all your tags in one place if you like. You just need to append a parameter to your url, so it looks like this: http://<your fogbugz site>/default.asp?pg=pgTagReport
That report used to be in FogBugz but we took it out for some reason. No one is sure why. I think we might just put it back in at some point.
4 - Selecting multiple items quickly
Let’s say you have a list of 75 cases and you want to get 17 of them selected to do a bulk operation on them. You could start clicking…one by one by one.
Or you could use your mouse to select all those cases in one quick motion. A video would probably work better, but this description will have to do.
Go to the gridview where you have a list consisting of a bunch of cases. Find some whitespace in one of the rows you can click, and then, without releasing your left mouse button, pull your mouse down the screen until you have highlighted all the cases you want. The cases will turn yellow as you highlight them. When you get where you want, just release the mouse button and you can then do what you need with the cases.
5 - Bulk Editing and Bulk Email
See item four above. Once you have the cases selected that you want to do something with (reply, close, reassign, change priority, whatever), click the edit (or reply) button at the bottom of the page.
Once you’re on the edit screen you’ll see a list of all your cases selected up top, and a little pane down on the bottom.
If you selected cases that have a correspondent, then the “reply” button would not be grayed out and you would select that one for emails. The pane on the bottom will let you scroll through the various cases you have selected to make extra sure you want to reply to each of the cases you have selected.
You can also populate your messages with custom bits of information that apply directly to the message in question. Click on the sign next to the word “advanced” to expose the options you have for adding information that’s relevant to each case.
If you insert one of these into your template response to all of your emails, you will get the information that is specific to that case or person.
For example, you could type:
Dear {sendername}:
Thanks for writing to us. Just so you know, we’re keeping track of this conversation in case {case}. If you want to check the status of it at any time, you can do that at {ticket_singlecase}.
Please reply to this email if you have any additional questions about this matter or send us a new message to {email} if anything else comes up.