Creating a Free Odoo Trial Database
So, you've probably heard about Odoo and you're thinking, "Well, how do I get started?" Well, it's actually not that hard, and I'm going to show you how to get set up. We're going to go from having nothing to something like this. Pretty awesome, right? Again, this doesn't require credit card information or anything else. There are absolutely no strings attached here. And then I'm going to walk you through a few little things that'll make your life a whole lot easier inside of Odoo. And we're going to do all this in just over 10 minutes. So, let's go ahead and hop in.
Let's start out by going into our favorite browser. Odoo really likes Google Chrome. So, if you can use Google Chrome, that's a great option. We're going to come up here, type Odoo trial. It's going to bring up this link right here. We're going to click in, and then we're going to start choosing the apps that we want to see here. Now, if you decide you want to add more apps later, that's totally fine. This is just a starting point really. So, I'm going to grab a few that I know I'm going to want. I'm going to want sales. I'm going to want to see, yeah, CRM, accounting. Let's come down through. Projects are good.
Yeah, I don't need any of this stuff, but I do want to get in purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, and go ahead and throw in studio as well, cuz that really opens up the functionality of Odoo. And then click continue. Now, let's give ourselves a company name. Go ahead and use a demo type one. So, I usually do Odoo It Yourself Demo, which is my company, and demo. And then I'll throw on today's date. So 7/2/25 and give them your phone number and come down through. Make sure all this is accurate and just click start now. And within a few minutes, we're all set up inside of Odoo. I do need to go ahead and activate this. So I'm going to go into my email and click the activation email. You're going to see an email looking like this. Go ahead and click to activate your database. It's going to bring you in and it's going to ask you a few questions here. I normally just skip this unless you want a free mug, which if you do, that's great. Go ahead and skip. Go to odoityourself.com. Well, my little guy here. And now we have, well, it says 14 days, but we have a full 15 days to play around in this.
Understanding Odoo's Integrated Data Structure
Now, if you just want an Odoo database to play around in, that's it. You know, we've got it set up. It's really not too painful. But let's go over a few things that will help you with navigating through Odoo, understanding how it works.
So you'll see Odoo is broken down into these little icons that Odoo refers to as apps. Essentially these are all different functionalities, but they all work together. For example, if I come into contacts here and create a new contact called Andrew Test and save that. When I come back out and go into sales and create a new sale, I can go to Andrew Test and you'll see that this customer field is linked to my contacts. You'll find these connections everywhere inside of Odoo. All the data is related, which is super useful. If you're coming from a bunch of spreadsheets or something similar, Odoo is really going to be a breath of fresh air for you and your company. Anyway, I'm not going to spend any more time on the data structure of Odoo. But if you'd like to learn more about that, check out this video here.
So, all the information inside of Odoo is connected in some way or another and is housed in what's known as a database, which again may be super basic for you guys, but the really wonderful thing about Odoo is every bit of this information that we throw in here is all in the exact same database. This isn't facilitated through connections like some other systems. So, it's very easy to pull this information out, do reporting, do other things like that. This is really highlighted inside the dashboard app where I can take information from sales, from my salespeople, from invoicing, accounting, and pull it all into one easily minable dashboard here.
Loading Demo Data for Exploration
Now, you can see I don't have any demo data in here right now, but that's another thing that we can put into our demo to make life a little bit easier for us and make it so that we can kind of explore how Odoo works. Before we add that though, if you do want a bit more information on dashboarding, go ahead and check out this video here. So, if we want to add some demo data, we can go into settings and then we can scroll all the way down here and click load demo data. There's going to be a warning that pops up that says, "Hey, you know, you may not want to do this if you want to use this as a production database, which is totally fine." We're going to say, "Yes, I understand the risks here."
Now, that's going to take a second to load, but once you have it loaded, you're going to have demo data in each of these apps. So, if I go into sales, you can see now I have some demo sales in here that are tied to demo customers, which are going to show up in our contacts right here.
Navigating Different Odoo Views
Now that we have some demo data, let's talk about how that data is shown to us. So inside of Odoo we have different views that we can use. So if we look at contacts, generally this is shown in a list view first which is going to look very much like an Excel spreadsheet. We can also have kanban views which show us a little bit of information in a card. Uh we have a map view that we can see different addresses things like that. Uh there are other views that we can use as well but the main ones are going to be list, kanban, and of course form where we see much more information related to one record or in this instance one contact.
Now the view we're choosing to interact with is going to very much depend on the situation. Kanban view is great for moving things from one step in a process to another while having a little bit of information. Uh, list views are great to be able to see a fair amount of information for a lot of records at the same time. And a form view is great for seeing basically everything about a record at once.
One of the pretty awesome things about Odoo is that using Studio, which is basically a drag and drop development tool, I can come in and I can say, well, for each contact, I want to, you know, grab a bit more information. So, I can click the little Studio icon right here, just in case you didn't see that. And I can come in and I can say, okay, well, for Abigail Peterson, I want another checkbox to say, you know, are they nice or something like that. And this allows us to as a company collect the information that's important to us. And we can do it very easily. I can also require certain fields, make them invisible in certain situations or always invisible. I can make it so certain groups of people with certain access rights, so different users, can only see this stuff or are prevented from seeing it. It's really a very robust platform in that way and doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge to work with properly. If you want to learn more about studio and views and editing all of those, go ahead and check out this video here and that'll take you deeper than we're going to in this video.
Using Filters and Group By
One other thing you're going to want to know how to use is filters and group by in each of these. So, if I go into sales, you can see I've currently got a filter set up here called my quotations. I can take that off, can throw it back on. I can say I only want to see quotations or I want to see just sales orders or I can limit this down by date. But then I can also come in and make a custom filter if I want that has different things set within it. Pretty cool. I can do the same thing with group bys where I can say I want a group by salesperson or group by customer. Um, this will allow me to see a hierarchy of, you know, customer and then salesperson if I want to. And then I can also add custom groups if I want to. I can save searches that I can share with other people. That's pretty cool, too. And depending on which view I want to use, you'll see this looks a bit differently. So, I have this group by customer right now. Moving cards between groups will change this field right here. So, customer. So, if I move this over from Lumber Inc. into Gemini Furniture, it then changes the customer to Gemini furniture. All pretty cool stuff and stuff that makes it so that you can use Odoo a little bit better.
Inviting Users to Your Database
So, now to a certain extent, you understand how Odoo kind of interacts with itself and how it's all set up. So, you can see the information, but what if we want to invite somebody else to check this out with us? Maybe a co-worker or friend, make sure that they understand this and can kind of evaluate Odoo as well. Well, adding new user is actually super easy. And part of this demo database is that it has a whole little email server set up for you. So, you can mess around with that. So, if we want to add somebody, we can go to settings and we can go to invite new users and just enter their email right here and they'll get an invite and can come in and mess around with Odoo, too.
So, obviously there's a lot more to learn about Odoo than just what we went over today, but this should get you started and get to where you can start playing around. Obviously, there's a ton more in Odoo that you can dive into, and I have other videos on my channel that you'll probably want to check out for that. But before I tape up this video, there are a few other things that I want you to be aware of if you're looking at Odoo and trying to decide whether it's right for your company. I cover all of this in more detail in this playlist, but let's cover some high-level items that you may want to look at. The first thing you're going to want to nail down is the edition of Odoo that you want to get. There's enterprise, which is what we looked at today and the one that you were getting a demo of, and there's community edition as well. The main differences between enterprise and community edition is that enterprise you pay for. You have to pay by user and get a license for each user, but it does come with a nicer accounting setup, Studio, which is a great tool, and quite a few other things that community doesn't have. Community is still a great product and if you're looking to save a little bit of money, it may work for you and your company. So, be aware that that is an option.
Choosing Your Odoo Hosting Option
The next thing you'll want to consider is your hosting. What we did today was with Odoo Online, which is more a software as a service thing where essentially you don't do any hosting or anything else. Odoo really takes care of everything there. The biggest drawback to having Odoo Online is that you can't install third-party apps. So there are a lot of different apps the developers have created to make Odoo even better and you just can't install those if you're on Odoo Online. The next step up would be Odoo.sh where you can install third-party apps. You can do some heavier development if you want to and it's still supported by Odoo. In fact managed by Odoo so you don't have to worry about having any issues there. And if you want the most freedom you can go ahead and go self-hosted. You can install Odoo on a desktop in your office or AWS or Azure. But again, this is more technical than the other two options. So be aware of that.
Key Considerations & Final Takeaways
Now, finally, other than the editions and hosting, making sure which one you want to use, you should be aware that Odoo is not really just plug-and-play. It can be for a lot of businesses and it has a ton of functionality, but this is not QuickBooks. Now, this is a good and a bad thing, right? Odoo is a much more robust and customizable platform than QuickBooks is, but there are things that it just doesn't do. One of those things, and this is important for a lot of companies, is payroll. QuickBooks has its own white glove payroll service where essentially all you have to do is put in hours or salary, and it basically takes care of the rest of payroll. That's not to say that you can't find other services to do this while you use Odoo, but Odoo itself is not going to do something like that. Anyway, all this being said, at the price point that it is, which is currently between $35 to $45 per user in the US, it's a pretty amazing product and you can try it out for free with no strings attached, which is pretty sweet. So, you might as well.
So, go ahead and check it out. Hit me up with any questions in the comments below. And if you need a little bit more help, go ahead and grab some time on my Calendarly and we should be able to get you sorted. And if you're looking for something a little more guided and going a little bit deeper, I do have courses and those are linked in the description as well. Anyway guys, thanks for stopping by. I appreciate it. And if this is the beginning of your journey with Odoo, good luck and you got this!
