Archive for June, 2009

Mapping Your Data

Monday, June 29th, 2009
Whether it’s a list of your contacts, office locations, or all the McDonald’s franchises in a 50-mile radius, chances are that somewhere in your QuickBase data you have a list of addresses.
But sometimes, a mere list just isn’t enough. There are a number of ways you could visualize this data. For instance, you could buy a big map and some pushpins. But with budgets stretched thin by the recession, who can afford pushpins? You could map each record individually online, but that would be tedious and time-consuming. Enter Mapping, a new tool that integrates QuickBase with Google Maps to make mapping of data easy and convenient.
Mapping is the first of many free QuickBase tools to be available at www.QuickBaseNation.com, a site sponsored by Data Collaborative to extend the capabilities of QuickBase (future tools include email filing and free file attachment space).

A Bright IKEA

Let’s say you’re searching for the nearest location to purchase some fine Swedish furniture.

ikea locations

This list of IKEA addresses has the information you need, but it doesn’t help you picture where the stores are.

QuickBase Nation’s free mapping tool will help you satisfy your craving for umlaut-laden product names as quickly as possible.

Make a Map

Mapping piggybacks off of a pre-existing QuickBase page, so the first step toward mapping your data is to log into your account at QuickBase.com. Leave that page open, and in a new tab or window navigate to QuickBaseNation.com. Create an account through the free and simple registration process. Upon logging into the Mapping utility, you will see a list of all your QuickBase tables. Pick the one with the address data, and QuickBase Nation will read it right out of QuickBase.

The next (and final) step is to pick out the fields that contain your address data. In most circumstances, these will be “Address 1,” “Address 2,” “City,” “State,” and “Zip.” But if the whole address is in one field, just enter that on the first line and leave the rest of the lines blank.

Then select a field to be the identifier and a title, and click on Submit. We used our IKEA table, but of course, you can map any addresses you have in QuickBase — up to 50 addresses per map.

Existing List

Hit the Road

Voila! Here’s your data: a breathtaking snapshot of IKEAs across America. Clicking on any red location indicator on the map will bring you to the QuickBase page for the record, and the data is presented in a format that should make it a snap to hop in the car and proceed to the nearest retailer. Unless you live in Nebraska.

Existing List

Keep in touch! Be sure to let us know if you come up with any particularly clever uses for Mapping. And if you would like us to customize this tool for your specific uses, please let us know that, too.

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Absorbing Tables

Monday, June 29th, 2009

Ever want to absorb one table into an application? The link for this is well hidden. Click on Help–>Application Site Map –>Absorb a Table.

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What’s This about Snapshots?

Monday, June 29th, 2009
A reader wrote in and asked “What is the QuickBase feature that is most important, but least used?” The answer is easy  - snapshot fields.

A snapshot field captures data from one table and stores it in a related table. (click here for the QuickBase help on this).

Lookup Fields

For example, let’s say you have a table of all the students in a school, including a reference to their teacher. Then you have a related table that lists all the teachers and their phone numbers. You could create a field in the student table called “My Teacher’s Phone Number”, and make it a lookup field that refers to the Phone Number field in the teacher record.

Easy enough so far, and in this case, you do not need a snapshot field, because if the teacher’s phone number changes, you want the “teacher phone number” field in the student record to change as well.

When a Snapshot is Needed

But let’s look at another example. Let’s say that you are using QuickBase to create invoices. For simplicity sake, let’s say you only sell one item at a time.

You have a list of items that you sell, and each one has a retail price. When you create the invoice, you select an item (because you have a relationship between your Items table and the Invoice table) and you include the price as a lookup field from Invoices to Items.

But what happens when the price changes? Let’s say you sell a lawnmower to Sam Suburbs on June 1 for $400. In August, you reduce the price to $300, and suddenly Sam’s invoice says that the mower cost him $300! That is incorrect, and will mess up your bookkeeping.

New Field

So instead, you need to create a snapshot field in the invoices table. You click on the table name, then Customize, Fields, Create New Field. Create a new field called “Price Snapshot” which is a Number-Currency field, and at the bottom of the page, at the Snapshot dropdown, select “Item-Price”.

This will cause the item’s price to be copied into the invoice, where it will not change, even if the item’s price actually does change.
Initialize Snapshot

A couple of notes here. First, the price in the invoice will change if you select a different item - like a dishwasher instead of a lawnmower.

Second, if you have existing data and you want to take snapshots of that data, you must click the checkbox saying “Initialize field for Existing Records” when you create the snapshot. You won’t have the opportunity again. If you forget, you need to delete the snapshot field, create a new one, and then click on the checkbox.

Recommendation

Any application that has relationships and is concerned about preserving data as it was entered needs snapshots so the data entered in the past does not change in the future. Specifically, accounting applications are big users of snapshots. When money changes hands, you want to record that amount forever, and that’s what snapshots are good for.

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