I’m Kimberly from Basecamp’s Customer Success team,
and in this video I wanna show you
10 things you can do in Basecamp
you might not know about.
If you’ve watched some of my other videos,
you may know that I was a Basecamp user
for more than a decade before working here,
and some of these things I didn’t know about
until really recently.
So I thought you might not know about them either.
Let’s jump right in.
Number one, appearance options.
If you follow the 37signals YouTube channel,
you may have seen our CEO Jason Fried,
doing some walkthroughs of how we use Basecamp.
I was watching one of his videos
and I noticed that his navigation bar and buttons
were a different color than mine.
I assumed he was on some
special, beta test version that I didn’t have.
But no, you can actually change that.
If you go to your avatar,
under personal settings, select appearance.
From there, you can change your theme colors.
I personally prefer to keep things simple
with the black or gray option,
but you have choices.
And if you prefer to view things in dark mode,
you can change that setting here too.
Number two, Heystack.
The Hey menu is like your Basecamp inbox
and it’s where your notifications show up.
Pretty straightforward.
But if you right click on your Hey menu,
and open it up in a new tab or new window,
it will take you to something called your Heystack.
This is where every notification
you’ve ever received from Basecamp lives.
I actually really like having my Heystack open
in a separate tab.
That way if I’m in the middle of working on something
like a draft,
I can pop over to see a notification
without getting that pop up
telling me I haven’t yet saved my work.
If you work in 18 tabs at the same time like I do,
Heystack is a game changer.
Number three, the shortcut menu.
When you’re inside a project tool,
you can get to another part of the project
by going back to the project homepage
and then selecting the tool you wanna get to.
So let’s say you’re on the message board,
you can go to the project page to to-dos.
Two clicks.
But there’s actually an easier way.
The four square icon will pop open the shortcut menu
and you can quickly switch from
one part of the project to another.
Number four, the jump menu.
When you wanna move between projects,
you can go to your home screen and select another project.
But if you have a lot of projects,
they won’t all show up in your recently visited section.
And even if you don’t have a ton of projects,
there’s a faster way.
The jump menu.
Command or Control J
will pop up the jump menu,
where you’ll see the places you’ve most recently visited,
as well as a list of all your projects.
The search area will also help you find a project quickly.
And here’s a power user tip.
The first listing in your jump menu
is where you were most recently.
So hitting enter or return takes you there.
So Command + J + Return for Mac
or Control + J + Enter on a PC
is a quick keyboard command to go back where you just were.
Number five, linking from search results.
Let’s say you’re looking for something in Basecamp.
You head to the find link in your navigation bar,
and you type in a search term.
You find what you’re looking for
and you wanna link to that in a message or a comment.
One way to do that is to go to the page you found in search,
copy the URL, and then paste it within your message.
But there’s an easier way.
From the search results,
you can hover over what you’re looking for,
and a link to copy the URL will appear on the far right.
Just click to copy and the URL is added to your clipboard,
making it even easier to paste somewhere else.
Number six, Basecamp as sheets of paper.
Now, this one is more about the Basecamp design
than it is a feature,
but I was watching a video that Jason was doing
on our YouTube channel,
and he just casually mentioned that Basecamp
was structured like sheets of paper
layered on top of each other.
Let me let him tell you.
When you create the project and you go back.
By the way, you’ll see me, to go back,
so Basecamp,
the interface is sort of based on sheets of paper.
So this is the front most sheet.
And the back.
Just to go back one level, you just click.
You can click on the link,
but you can also click anywhere in the back sheet
is what we call it.
So I’ll just click over here.
Seriously, I have been using Basecamp forever
and never knew that.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Number seven, grouping to-dos.
You can have multiple to-do lists within a project.
But if you wanna break down your work even further,
you can group to-dos to create a sort of sublist.
To do that, just click on the three lines
to the left of a list’s name and select add a group.
You can add a name and give it a color.
And then add to-dos under that group.
If you already have a list of tasks on a list,
you can group them
by holding down the command or control key,
selecting them with the three lines on the left
and going to group them,
where you can name your group.
It’s also easy to drag and drop to-dos
from one group to another.
Number eight, closing comment threads.
Sometimes there’s no reason to keep discussing something.
Maybe there’s been some back and forth
and a decision has been made.
Whatever the reason, you can close comments
if you’re the original author of the post
or an account owner or admin.
Just click the three dot menu at the top right
and go to close comments.
This works for comment threads on messages, documents
and files, to-dos, and even the card table.
If you go to the change log,
you’ll even see when comments were turned off.
Number nine, seeing files from Campfires and Pings.
You can always go to the find feature in your navigation bar
if you’re looking for something.
But there’s a really easy way
to see all the files or images
that have been posted in a Campfire or a Ping.
From within the conversation, use the three dot menu
at the top right and go to see all files posted here.
That will take you to a page where you can see
everything that’s been uploaded in one place.
And you can easily view or download those items.
Number 10, sounds and campfires and pings.
Okay, this last one is a little fun.
You can play sounds within campfires or pings
with a quick keyboard command
of slash play followed by a keyword.
Use slash play rimshot when someone posts a dad joke,
or slash play crickets or slash play bueller
when you’re not getting a response on something.
There’s slash play trombone for bad news
and I personally love to give someone’s awesome idea
a slash play whoomp,
or slash play rumble to kick off a project.
I mean, who says work has to always be serious?
I’ll link to a cheat sheet of sounds
in the YouTube description for this video.
And speaking of YouTube, let me know in the comments
which of these hidden features you didn’t know about before.
I hope I taught you something new
and I will see you in another video soon.
(upbeat music)