F1 — Apps and navigation

Odoo looks like eleven programs sitting next to each other. It is one, and almost everything that surprises people about it follows from that: an app is a set of menus over a shared database, so a contact is not a customer record and a supplier record but one row that Sales, Accounting and the warehouse each describe in their own vocabulary. Confirm a delivery in the warehouse and a valuation entry appears in the ledger, without anybody in Accounting doing it.

Then the top bar that never changes — Discuss for internal chat, the clock for everything in the database waiting on you, your avatar for settings that are yours alone — and the anatomy every screen shares: a menu runs an action, the action opens a view, the view shows records, which is why one list is reachable from three menus. It ends on the four ways to reach a document and one trap: a pager counts what exists rather than what loaded, and Ctrl+K searches commands and menus but never a record.