QuickBase Straight Up

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:

1. Free File Storage. QuickBase charges extra for file storage beyond 1 gigabyte (your limit may vary, depending on your plan). But QuickBaseNation provides up to 5 gigabytes for free, or up to 50 gigs for just a few bucks. It’s QuickBaseNation’s most popular feature.
   

   QuickBase Nation Storage Example

2. Free Mapping. Take your QuickBase list of contacts, customers, or in-laws and QuickBaseNation will map them and then give you a link to put that map on your website, if you want. Check out this example of locations to buy Swedish meatball dinners at reasonable prices.
   

   List of Places to Eat Swedish Meatballs at a Reasonable Price

   

   Find Those Swedish Meatballs on a Map, Thanks to QuickBase ... and QuickBaseNation.com

3. Free Design Tool. Our friends at Advantage Integrated Solutions have an excellent tool covering the many elements you might consider as you initially plan a new QuickBase application.
   

   Advantage QuickBase App Design Tool

4. Free Templates. QuickBase has a boatload of free templates. From “assigning hotel rooms” to “multi-party litigation,” there’s truly an app for that. Just click on “Create a New Application” from the “My QuickBase” page.
5. Synchronize QuickBase with Constant Contact. Constant Contact is the friend of tens of thousands of small businesses. It  delivered this newsletter, for example! Ever want to synchronize a list from QuickBase with a Constant Contact list? It’s easy to do at QuickBaseNation.
   

   Contact Sync - QuickBase to Constant Contact

6. QuickBase on the Android. As we described last month, there are several smartphone apps for QuickBase, and one of them (“MobileBase,” which is from Data Collaborative, if we may say so) is free.
   

   

   MobileBase for Android Screenshot

7. File Emails into QuickBase. Wouldn’t it be great if you could send a client an email and it would magically appear in QuickBase? If you want to file emails for free, or you want a filer that will work with any email client, see QuickBaseNation. (Yes, SendToQuickBase is the dominant app in this field, and it’s built well. But it isn’t free, and it works only with the Microsoft Outlook email client.)
8. Backup QuickBase to Your Desktop. Peace of mind might be the greatest gift of all in the new year — and it can also be obtained for free! After a one-time setup, the QuickBase Desktop Backup Edition from Data Collaborative can run automatically to backup your QuickBase applications as a precaution against data loss. Don’t fret again about losing a single byte.
   

That’s it for the free apps! See you next month!

Happy clicking,
Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative

• You Read It Here First on QuickBase Straight Up. A version of my review on this blog of smartphone applications for viewing and editing QuickBase apps was published this month on Intuit’s QuickBase Blog. It was my debut on that blog, and I’m grateful for the support of the QuickBase marketing teams in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Orem, Utah, for their interest in publishing my thoughts on their blog. Special thanks to Alexandra Hastings for her work to make it happen.
  
• Something’s Coming, Something Good. In the early part of West Side Story, Tony has a picture of Maria in mind when he sings Something’s Coming, Something Good. Me? I’ve got a beautiful picture of the QuickBase release scheduled for this weekend in mind when I think of that tune. While we wait for Intuit to make a widely anticipated announcement, get excited by singing with me…Or let’s not. My singing isn’t so hot. So, gee, Officer Krupke put the kibosh on uploading any YouTube performance. But rest assured, after Intuit announces its enhancements to QuickBase — and it will, soon — we’ll be here at this blog to let you know about their significance and how they can improve the good work you do.

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:

• PocketBase from Madskills, Inc. Written for iPhone and iPad, PocketBase was the first app out of the gate, published on the iTunes App Store on July 4, 2010. It costs $1.99.
• QuickDroid, from Bret Foreman. This $10 app for Android devices was launched in October, 2010. (Don’t confuse this app with the identically named QuickDroid app from Daniel Himmelein, which has nothing to do with QuickBase.)
• MobileBase, from The Data Collaborative. This free Android app from my shop is the newest offering on the market. It was published this month

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 –

Eric Segal
The Data Collaborative
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Files are getting bigger and online storage space is becoming more abundant, so it’s no surprise that many QuickBase users have sought alternatives to the fees incurred when you store more than  QuickBase’s 100MB limit. For those users who have maxed out their storage space, QuickBase Nation is offering a new service that provides an expanded 500MB of free file storage for QuickBase.

If you need more than 500 megs, stay tuned for QuickBaseNation’s Preferred Membership — available in November.
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Setting It Up
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Configuring QuickBase Nation’s file storage service is easy. QuickBase Nation piggybacks off of your QuickBase account, so the first step is to log into QuickBase. Then, in a new browser window, navigate to QuickBaseNation.com and sign into your free QuickBase Nation account. Once logged in, click the Free File Storage link.
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The file storage utility currently allows you to add expanded file sharing capabilities to one table. From the list of tables, select the one to which you want to add the expanded file storage, and come up with a name for your files (it should be a singular noun; for instance, correspondence or photo).

 

QuickBase Nation will then add a set of three fields to your table: upload, download, and delete. These will allow you to manage your attached files through a simple interface. Add the three fields to your forms and reports to fully integrate the new file storage capabilities into your application.

 

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.

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.

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.

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!