QuickBase Straight Up

It’s common knowledge that an advanced search in QuickBase will look inside the contents of a text field for your search phrase. But did you know that QuickBase can also search inside the full text of file attachments? Simply select the file attachment field and choose either “contains the word” or “contains a word that starts with.” Perform your search, and QuickBase will return all the records that match your query.

 

This feature does not allow you to do complicated searches: QuickBase will only use the first word of your search phrase, and ignore everything after that. However, this is still a handy tool for digging up old records or attachments.

Then click on Connect to New Data Source   

Then choose ODBC DSN.

Then choose QuickBase via QuNect.
Now you’ll need to choose your QuickBase table.

You can edit the recipient list.

Microsoft Word allows you to apply filtering and sorting criteria. It even allows you to find duplicates. The rest of your mail merge conforms to the standard capabilities of Microsoft Word.

Having an ODBC driver for QuickBase opens up alot of possibilities beyond mail merges in MS Word. You can use Crystal Reports or MS Access to generate highly customized reports with sophisticated headers, footers and page breaking. You can flow data into worksheets easily to apply the power of Excel charting to your QuickBase data. You can use FuzzyDupes to dedupe your contact table after importing a list from a trade show you attended. Or you can create a linked server to QuickBase in SQL Server to facilitate moving data between SQL Server and QuickBase. The possibilities are endless!

Have you ever wanted to have two dropdowns, where the options in the 2nd dropdown depended on what you chose in the first? For example, if you were renting a car and you chose “Ford” for the manufacturer, you would then want only Fords to show up in the model dropdown.

One of the most common database tasks is searching for a value and replacing it with another value. You can do this in QuickBase, but you have to look hard to find the right buttons. Today, we’ll show you how to do it.

For example, say that you have a sales office in Kansas City that covers all your sales in the Great Plains. But your sales increase, and you decide you need to open a second office in Dallas to cover sales in Oklahoma and Texas.

You need to change the sales office for all your customers in Oklahoma and Texas - and you don’t want to do it by hand. Here’s what you do: Create a report that lists all the customers you want to change. Your search filter will look something like this:

Once you have your list, you’ll see, near the top of the report, a little link that says “OTHER” Click on that and you will see, among many other options “Search & Replace (in this report only)” (if you do not see that option, then you do not have permission to make multi-record changes, and you cannot do a Search and Replace).

Select the field that you wish to change (Sales Office in our example), and then enter the text you want to change FROM, and change TO. Click on OK, and QuickBase will tell you how many records will be affected. If the number seems correct to you, click on Replace, and the data will be changed.

Multiple deletes are also possible with this strategy. Just create a report of the records you want to delete, and then, under “Other”, the option “Other Operations on Customers in this Report”. Click there and you will see a delete option.

Q. Is there an easy way to find data in my application? I don’t know which table it is in.

A. Use the Quick Find feature. Select the “Find” menu in the top menu bar, directly above the blue bar menu.  This version of Find starts off by searching for a word or phrase in your entire application.  The results are shown using the default report format for each table that contains the word or phrase.