ODB supports "right-clicking" on practically anything that shows up in the Main Menu. This is a crucial point: if you try to use ODB without making use of the right mouse button, you will miss about half of ODB's features. We previously mentioned the right-click capabilities of the search button. A special "context menu" can be accessed using the right mouse button or by left-clicking on the triangle on the right side of the button. The New, Edit, Clone, Print, Advanced Search, Copy Emails, Import/Export, and Mass Action buttons also have this right-click ability. We recommend that you click each of these to see all the options.

Right-Clicking on a Record. If you right-click on a record highlighted in the search results box of the Main Menu, you will see a list of sixteen additional choices you can make.

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You can copy a person's name or other contact information to the Windows clipboard, so that you can paste it into a letter or an email message very easily. (Almost every Windows program allows you to paste information in this manner from the Edit menu, or with the Control-V key combination from the keyboard.)

If someone moves, you can mark that person's "address expired" so that if you reconnect with her/him later, you will retain all the other non-address information you have collected. When you choose this option, the selected address will be marked in red to clearly indicate that it is no longer a good address. It also makes it easy to omit known bad addresses from mailings to save postage.

This feature is designed especially for the nonprofit that sends out a fundraising mailing to a few thousand people, and ends up with hundreds of returns from the post office. And in case you do get a forwarding address from the post office, the option "Mark address as Old; Enter New" provides a shortcut that saves the old address, clears it out, and opens the record for editing. These features save a lot of time when you have a stack of returns to go through.

If you are connected to the Internet, you can automatically do a number of searches. ODB will pull up a map (Mapquest), look up a phone number in the white pages (Yahoo), search for a person in Google.com, look up a ZIP code if you have the rest of an address (USPS), or even find a city if you only have a phone number (Google).

The ability to delete a record is also available in this list of sixteen right-click options. The delete option is not available on the Main Menu screen to reduce the potential for a volunteer to delete records. You can also use the delete key on your keyboard to delete a highlighted record.

Note that when you delete a person's record from the database, ODB will also delete any donations that belong to this person. To delete a single donation: go to the View Payments screen, highlight the specific donation, and then use the Delete button or the delete key on the keyboard.

When deleting anything, you will be asked to confirm the operation, and mass delete requires an extra password as well for extra security.

Right-Clicking on the Preview Pane. Besides clicking on a whole record in the search results box on the Main Menu, you can right-click on any of the parts of a record shown in the preview pane and the detailed preview pane (street address, city, state, phone numbers, etc.). This will bring up a whole new set of menu options.

Some of these options are "Find People Like Me" searches. For example, if you right-click on the address in the preview pane, you will see options to select all the other people in the same city, or the same state, or the same ZIP code. If you right-click on the tracking code buttons in the Detailed Preview area, you can find other people who share some or all of the same tracking codes. (See below to turn on the Detailed Preview area.)

Right-clicking in the preview pane makes it possible to erase an email address entirely, or just mark it as bad. The feature is similar to "Mark Address As Expired" but for online organizers. If you send an email message to 200 people and get 20 "bounces" from people whose email accounts have permanently expired, you can quickly update your contacts. (This is especially important because repeatedly emailing an address that is permanently expired will cause that Internet Service Provider to assume you are sending spam and blacklist your email account.) ODB allows you to do the same thing with bad phone numbers; an ODB user suggested this addition.

Two other options in the right-click menu for an email address are "Visit Website for this Email Address" and "Find Records with Same Email Suffix." The first feature means that right-clicking on steve@hudsoncdc.org will open up your web browser, and if you are connected to the Internet, take you to the page http://hudsoncdc.org. This feature is extremely convenient if you have Steve's email address and you want to find the postal address of his organization. (This feature will not be useful if the email address is an account at AOL or Hotmail.) The second feature allows you to select all the records that have the same email suffix. This means that if you right click on Steve's email address and choose this option, you will see a list of records that all have an email address ending in @hudsoncdc.org. This can be used to find all members of an organization based on email address.