QuickBase Straight Up

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.

In the bad old days before Software Services like QuickBase, a business could live or die by its backups. A hard disk crash  or a careless employee could wreck a business by accidentally overwriting an important file.

QuickBase users don’t have quite as many worries. You don’t have to worry about disk crashes, as Intuit staff make sure that there are always duplicate hard drives running; if one fails, there is another to instantly take its place.

But backups are still important. A hostile or careless employee could still delete records in an important table. And even though QuickBase’s security has (in my experience) a perfect record, user security lapses (like writing a password on a Post-It and sticking it to a monitor) can still lead to the wrong person getting access to your data.

Since the data is not on your computer, you can’t make a backup the old fashioned way — you can’t just copy a file on your hard disk. Instead, you have three options — pick the one that is right for you.

Copy Your Application

The easiest method is to use QuickBase to make a copy of your application. Click on Customize, Application, Misc, then Copy Application. You then have some options, and typically you want to copy it WITH Data and WITHOUT users in their roles (so they don’t all see the backup on their “My QuickBase” page).

Once you create your backup, name it Operations Backup as of April 3, 2008 or something like that so you remember when you created it.

This is a great strategy, unless you don’t  have enough space in your account for either the data or the file attachments.  If this is the case, QuickBase will tell you that you don’t have room and you will need to try another option.

Use the QuickBase Backup

QuickBase backs up your data every day, and they can restore your complete application from those backups. But there are costs associated with this approach.

The back-ups are free and automatic, but restoring your application costs $1,000. Alternatively, you can purchase the Backup Plan for $50 per month (call your salesperson) and QuickBase will provide up to 3 restores per year at no additional cost.

If for some reason neither of the options above works for you, you can download Quickbase Desktop at https://www.quickbase.com/db/6mztyxu8?a=dr&rid=52. Much more than just a backup tool (an article for a future issue of this newsletter!), QuickBase Desktop is a Microsoft Access application that will copy the data and file attachments from one or more QuickBase applications and store it in MS Access format on your computer.
A problem with this approach is that it copies your data only. None of the other elements of your application — forms, rules, reports, formulas, emails, variables, roles or permissions are copied.  So QuickBase desktop is a great tool for copying your data, but not for backing up your application!

If you are a Mac user or if you do not own MS Access, this approach will not help you. You could make text copies of every table, but then you would not have the file attachments, nor would you have the forms, reports, etc.

If your application is too big for you to copy within QuickBase, one option is to copy it without data, then backup your data with QuickBase DeskTop. A restore would not be totally straightforward, but it would be possible, and in the end you would have a complete restore of both data and other application elements (thanks to Anne Murray for this idea!)