QuickBase Straight Up

We were planning on a second issue of QuickBase best practices, but that will have to wait - QuickBase surprised us with a November release so let’s all get up to date on the new features!

User Management

 

You can now import and provision any number of users by just importing from a comma delimited (csv) file. And once they are imported, you can search by name, type of user or other criteria, and then deactivate, deny use, or email all the users you have selected.

 

Reporting

 

In the past, if you had two or more filters for a report, you could only delete the bottom one. Now, using the red light/green light icons, you can add or delete filters at any point in the stack.

 

These insert/delete icons appear when you float your mouse over filter lines during report setup.

 

Sandbox

 

This one is important. It has always been difficult to make changes to QuickBase applications that are in production — there has always been the risk of accidentally breaking an important app during development.

 

Now, Enterprise users can create a “sandbox” — a development environment where they can make changes without affecting the active application. When development and testing are done, you press a button, and all your changes are applied to the active application.

 

This does not solve all the issues related to development. For example, you cannot make any destructive changes to the sandbox application. You can’t delete fields or tables, change data types, etc. So if your changes involve any deletions, the sandbox will not help you.

 

But still, for Enterprise customers at least, it is a big step forward!

 

Happy clicking –

Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative  

    Almost every time you set up a relationship in QuickBase, a “proxy field” is created. That’s so when you pick a parent record, you see a dropdown that is meaningful to you.
    For example, if you have a relationship between Projects and Customers (one Customer to many Projects), the real relationship is between the Project and the Customer’s Number. But a Customer Number (1,2,3) is probably meaningless to you. What you really want to see is the Customer Name. So in a case like this, you want the Customer Name to be a proxy field in the relationship.

   The Infamous Proxy Field - Should it be banned?

 

 

    In most cases, it’s best to keep your company’s work in a single QuickBase application. That’s because tables often relate to each other. For example, if you have one application for Order Entry and another for Customer Satisfaction, they are both going to use your Customer List, your Employee List, and probably other tables too. You don’t want to have two Customer lists so that means that one application will need to hold the Customer list, and the other will have to use a cross-application relationship to see it. Cross-application relationships are OK, but they have some limits. Better to keep it all in one application.
    Of course, there are exceptions to this. If your applications are owned by different people, or they just get big and un-manageable, it’s best to separate them. But don’t do it unless you have a good reason.