Visual Freezers: Part 1
An introduction to Visual Freezers - Freezerworks' all new way to navigate your freezers using an intuitive graphical interface.
Visual Freezers Part 1
An introduction to Visual Freezers - Freezerworks' all new way to navigate your freezers using an intuitive graphical interface.
Introduction – 00:00
Hey guys, welcome to the Freezerworks 2019 Learning Series, your visual guide to our sample management software. Today, we begin our deep dive into the brand new way you'll interact with freezers in Freezerworks - we call it Visual Freezers. Instead of long lists that don't match the real world and merely pictures of boxes, your entire freezer and all of its subdivisions will be visualized in an intuitive and interactive graphic. For example, this is Explore Freezers, found in the Search menu, or you can open it from the home page like I did. Your Physical Freezers are listed on the left as well as a Freezer Aliases tab if you'd rather start there. Select a Freezer or an Alias, and a picture of the selection will appear to the right.
Explore Freezers – 01:05
Now, I've selected a freezer with multiple sections. So to begin, those sections are displayed in the picture. If the freezer you select only has a single section, it will immediately be opened. As you've probably already noticed, colors and percentages are provided to show you how full each container is. We call this Freezer Capacity and it will be present throughout your experience of Visual Freezers, as you will see. In Explorer Freezers, you can turn it off at any time with this box. So, let's say I want to see what's in my DJM1 section, which is a five subdivision freezer with shelves, racks, and boxes. All I have to do is click the section in the picture to virtually open it and see what's inside. The picture not only shows the shelves, but the individual racks inside each shelf are visualized as well, to give you a really good idea of the state of your freezer. The shelves and racks, by the way, are arranged in a particular fashion that emulates my freezer in the real world. We'll go over how to configure Visual Freezers in a later video. For now, let's just learn how to use the tool.
Everything in the picture is interactive, hovering over anything will pop open a tooltip with more details about the object being highlighted, and where you click matters. In my freezer, for instance, if I click a shelf, that specific shelf will open and I'll see the racks with their individual boxes inside, but if I click directly into a rack, I'll instead skip to see a picture of just the boxes and there aliquot totals inside the specific rack I clicked. If you ever need to go back to open a different subdivision use the tabs at the top to reverse-navigate. They will appear automatically as you explore, leaving a ‘breadcrumb-like’ trail for you to always find your way back. If you need to select a different Freezer Section altogether, simply re-click the Physical Freezer in the list to the left to get back to this section level.
Now, once you have drilled all the way down into a box and can see the individual positions and currently occupying aliquots, what you can do with the picture increases. On any empty position, you can right-click and create a sample with an aliquot that will occupy the highlighted position. You can also create a sample with aliquots that fill a range of positions by using the CTRL or Shift key to select a group of positions. Instead of right-clicking, you can also highlight and click the Actions menu button, which contains the same options as the right-click menu. Now, as you can see, these other positions are already filled by aliquots; if you highlight one and right-click, a much larger menu of options will open. Everything you can do to existing aliquots on a list view, or inside a sample, can be done from Explore Freezers as well.
General Visual Freezer Tips – 03:50
Before leaving Explore, there are a few general features of Visual Freezers that I should mention. As you'll notice, the aliquots in my freezer box have icons next to them. These represent their Aliquot Status. If you need a refresher on what the icons mean, and what the consequences of each status are, check out your Aliquot Status field’s configuration. All of my aliquots also have color on them, a color that differs from the Freezer Capacity we saw earlier. These colors are determined by the field chosen in this Color dropdown, so I can quickly change the way my aliquots are colored on the fly. We will go over this in greater detail in a later video, but freezer box colors will no longer be set up freezer to freezer. Instead, system-wide field definitions will be used so that freezers are colored just like your list views and entry forms. Any field that has color formatting setup in its configuration will be available in this dropdown. Remember that this dropdown is also in User Preferences as a default setting. Finally, if you find yourself squinting while exploring freezers, whether due to your screen size or the number of subdivisions in the picture, feel free to resize the Explore Freezers window at any time. The picture itself will grow and shrink to match whatever size you need.
Conclusion – 05:10
That about does it for our first look at Visual Freezers. We looked at Explore Freezers and how the new visual interface works in general. Next time, we'll look at the more specialized Visual Freezers tool, Move Aliquots, which should feel very familiar after today. And if you're still wondering how to configure Visual Freezers to match your environment, look for Part 4 in this series. Thanks as always for watching see you next time!