QuickBase Straight Up is published by The Data Collaborative, which works with both developers and users to locate areas where QuickBase instruction is needed.
If your company is using QuickBase, you probably know why it was initially needed. The requirement might have been for project management, sales tracking, or something else.
A happy moment for many QuickBase users comes when they realize that for no additional cash, their subscription gives them access to dozens of free application templates. Whatever you are doing now with QuickBase, chances are you can do even more to streamline your enterprise (or simply improve your life) at no extra cost.
Templates made by both Intuit and by members of the QuickBase community can be valuable in extending QuickBase’s functionality. Any template can be installed with the click of a button! Even if you’re an experienced QuickBase user, it can’t hurt to look at the options available in the template gallery. You might discover something you never knew you needed.
Here’s a brief introduction to some of the template categories available.
Customer Support: You may be tracking sales in QuickBase, but have you ever thought about using it as a platform to reach out to the customers themselves? This category includes templates for applications that conduct surveys, run support forums, and more.
Marketing: Develop press releases, manage communication materials, and plan conferences and other special events with the templates available in this category.
Information Technology: A variety of templates are available to make tech support simple. Track bugs, handle support requests, and more with these applications.
Make It Personal: You might as well put the corporate QuickBase subscription to work for you as well; there’s no extra cost involved. The business-meets-pleasure category includes templates as diverse as a calorie tracker, a movie review database, and a wine cellar manager.
Best of the Rest: What about a log for keeping track of vehicle maintenance and repair? The range of available templates will surprise you, and maybe you’ll find exactly what you need.
How do you get started? It’s easy. After logging in, click on the orange “Intuit QuickBase” in the top left corner of the screen. Then click on the big green “Create a new application” button in the top left-center of the screen (if you don’t have that button, it means you do not have permission to create a new application. Talk to your Account Administrator). Then click on the “Templates” tab. You’re off into a world of variety in available templates.
If you notice any glaring voids in the selection of templates — or you think others might have a use for your awesome personal customized application — then you can submit it to the template gallery yourself. Have you put any of these templates to work? Discovered any hidden gems? Let us know!
Happy clicking,
Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative
Did you catch the announcement that Intuit and Salesforce are joining forces to provide CRM (Customer Relationship Management) for QuickBooks by linking QuickBooks to Salesforce? That’s nice, but what about QuickBase?
I write about this quirky announcement and forecast its implications for QuickBase in a post in Data Collaborative’s QuickBase News blog, available on our QuickBase page.
We’re going to depart briefly from our normal focus on “All QuickBase, All the Time” because no matter how much you know about QuickBase, if you don’t understand how to design your database, it’s not going to work well.
If you have a database and you start seeing problems like the following, it is probably because your database is not designed correctly:
OK, so what do I need to know to get the design right?
Some good news here: QuickBase takes some steps to make sure you do it right.
There is a Record ID# (a unique number) assigned to every record in every table. That is called the key field, and the first rule is: Don’t change the key field unless you know what you are doing.
I’m not going to go into why this is important - if you are curious, look up the First Normal Form of Data Normalization. QuickBase users used to change the key field in order to change how the record title displayed, but that is no longer necessary since you can now change the record label on the table’s Advanced Properties tab.
More good news: When you set up a relationship between two tables, QuickBase automatically uses the key field to make the connection. In this case, QuickBase won’t even let you mess it up, so no worries here.
But one thing QuickBase cannot help you do is set up the tables correctly in the first place. To get that correct, read on:
What you really need to know
Before you create your database, think of what you are trying to keep track of. Make a list of those things. Then for each thing, figure out whether it corresponds to one, or more than one, of the other things.
If the answer is one, then those things must be in the same table. If the answer is more than one, then those things must be in different, related tables.
For example, say you are keeping track of law offices, lawyers, their mobile phone numbers, their spouse’s name, and the cases the lawyers are working on.
Now let’s figure out whether each of those corresponds to one, or more than one, of the others. Start at the top.
Can each law office have more than one lawyer? Yes — so Law Offices and Lawyers should go in different, but related tables.
Can each lawyer have more than one mobile phone number? Theoretically they could, but we can’t design for every weird eventuality. I would say one lawyer, one cell phone — so they should go in the same table. (Not everyone would agree.)
Can each lawyer have more than one spouse? Here I think we are on pretty clear ground. Absent TV sitcoms, each lawyer needs to be content with no more than one spouse - so lawyers and spouses go in the same table.
Finally, can each lawyer have more than one case? Definitely yes - so cases and lawyers go in separate, but related tables.
Of course, there is a lot more to database design. You’ll learn as you get experience. But if you design according to the very simple rules above, you will avoid 95% of the mistakes in designing a database.
Next Issue: Back To QuickBase
For better or for worse, there are a lot of places to get help with QuickBase. We’ll give you a guide of what to look for, and what you might find when you need a little help.
Plus — tips on making your QuickBase application look like an Iphone app, from friend-of the-newsletter David Bruton.
It’s almost ancient now, but remember that promise you made to yourself to be thrifty in 2011?
QuickBase Straight Up is here to help. This is a list — as complete as we could make it — of free resources on the web to enhance your use of QuickBase.
The great thing about free tools is not just that you don’t have to pay for them — after all, how much would you miss the 99 cents you might spend for one of these apps? — it’s also that you don’t have to really think about whether they’re worth the bother. At these prices, just go ahead and grab them, like a squeeze ball at a trade show, and keep your wallet in your pocket!
Full disclosure: Many of the resources listed here reside on QuickBaseNation.com, a website maintained by The Data Collaborative, which is my shop.
Our list of freebies:
QuickBase Nation Storage Example
List of Places to Eat Swedish Meatballs at a Reasonable Price
Find Those Swedish Meatballs on a Map, Thanks to QuickBase ... and QuickBaseNation.com
Advantage QuickBase App Design Tool
Contact Sync - QuickBase to Constant Contact
MobileBase for Android Screenshot
That’s it for the free apps! See you next month!
Happy clicking,
Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative
Smartphones and tablet devices change our lives at home, work, and on the go. Now, QuickBase is part of the mobile revolution.
At least 3 mobile apps work directly with QuickBase, and a fourth app provides a nice platform-independent bridge to QuickBase data. In this article, I’ll take a quick look at these choices, and let you know what might be best for you.
(Full disclosure: One of the apps comes out of my shop. But I’ll do my best to be impartial. That’s easy, in fact, because all three apps use the same tool set and produce similar results.)
The three apps now available are:
Comparing Basic Features of the Apps
Getting Started. Generally, to use any of the apps, you enter a username and password, select an application, a table, and a report, and then you can view the report. If you are an Enterprise QuickBase user, all three apps let you select a realm.
App Tokens. All three apps permit you to enter app tokens. But typing those 26 alphanumeric characters on a teeny keyboard can be very frustrating. The easiest solution is to allow access to your applications without apptokens.
MobileBase provides one other option by providing a default app token that makes life a bit easier, because you can type the app token into your computer instead of your phone. But taking that route compromises security, since the app token is not private.
Sending Email and Making Phone Calls from QuickBase. All three apps also allow you to click on email addresses to send email. And PocketBase and MobileBase do the same with phone numbers. QuickBase durations are a little tricky (do you display them in seconds, hours, years, or what?) but MobileBase and QuickDroid both handle these well.
What You See On Your Screen. All three apps struggle with presentation, which makes sense as you just cannot display as much data on a smartphone display as you can on a computer screen. PocketBase handles this challenge by giving you neat search capability to search for a row within a report. MobileBase gives you two presentation modes. One mode shows as a table (displaying lots of data but can require horizontal scrolling). The other mode shows as an expandable list (displays less data until you click on a row). All three apps allow you to view reports in table mode.
PocketBase and MobileBase both allow you to save favorites, which makes it easier to return to reports you want to see again and again.
Why are these three apps all so similar? It’s because they all use the same toolset. QuickBase gives us a limited number of tools (or “API calls”) that we can use to connect with QuickBase. Those tools allow apps to do some things easily and other things not so easily. We’d like to allow you to generate new reports from your phone, but the available API calls do not make that easy. We’d also like to let you look at charts, but those are not available through the API. (MobileBase gets around this by opening the charts and summary reports in your Android’s browser, so you can at least view them that way).
So can I enter data into QuickBase on any of these? Sadly, the answer is no. But don’t despair and please read on, because a fourth app offers another option. Data entry in any of these apps would be a little more complex than data reporting. Although all three developers are considering adding data entry to a future version, none have done so yet. Here at Data Collaborative, we are waiting to see what the demand is like for QuickBase smartphone apps, and I suspect the other developers are doing the same.
So what’s the solution if I want to enter data to QuickBase from my smartphone? Canvas provides a neat tool for cross-platform data entry, such as from your smartphone to QuickBase. You design a form once, and then you can use it on many smartphones. For now, Canvas handles Android, Windows, and Blackberry models; iPhones and iPads are coming soon. At Data Collaborative, we’ve connected Canvas with QuickBase (and QuickBooks too, if you’re interested). There is an additional charge for Canvas.
So vote with your fingers! Check out these apps and then rate them in the appropriate marketplace. I bet I can speak for all the developers in saying that we look forward to hearing what you have to say!
That’s it for now. Happy clicking –
Have you ever wished that life had an undo button? Accidents happen, and in some cases they just can’t be undone. But there’s no reason for accidentally deleted QuickBase records to be among life’s irreversible errors.
“Soft deletion” refers to the practice of marking records for deletion without actually removing the data. It’s easy to implement in QuickBase and it’s a great way to ensure that you’ll never again find yourself slapping your forehead wishing you hadn’t just clicked delete.
To implement soft deletion in your application, begin by creating a checkbox field called “Delete.” For most of your users, this will become the new “Delete” button in lieu of QuickBase’s built-in delete feature.
Next, go to Customize > Roles. The trick here is to configure the roles of ordinary users so that they can only view and modify records whose “Delete” field is unchecked. (We recommend leaving the Administrator role with full access to all records, so that it is possible to access and un-delete the soft-deleted records.) For ordinary users, the permissions settings should look something like these:
Notice that the user does not have the ability to delete records using the built-in delete function. Instead, the user’s viewing and modifying abilities are limited to a certain set of records, determined by the following rule:
To the ordinary or average user, the Modify Record page now features a “Delete” button that is actually a “soft delete” checkbox rather than the standard Delete button.
One downside to soft deletion is that it can lead to clutter; it’s unseen clutter for ordinary users, but for you it’s clutter nonetheless. One way to tackle this issue is to create custom reports for roles that have the ability to view soft-deleted records (typically just the Administrator role). Excluding soft-deleted records from the “List All” report and creating a separate report exclusively for them is a good strategy to separate out the clutter and manage the soft-deleted records.
A More Advanced Solution…
An alternative method is to add the “Delete” field from a master/child relationship as a lookup in the child table. Then secure the child table based on the new lookup field.
This approach allows you to soft-delete the master record and cause all child records to be soft-deleted as well.
We would be happy to work with you to implement this solution in your database.
That’s it for now. Happy clicking –
