QuickBase Straight Up

    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.

    Most of a database’s power, and most of its complexity, is in the relationships between tables. If your application has one table in it, that is a clear sign that you are missing out on the jelly in the QuickBase doughnut. Relationships are important!
    You need to learn how QuickBase deals with relationships, but even before that, you need to see why relationships are important. A good starting point is the article here. This is specifically about MS Access, but the article is still good for QuickBase users and it is way easier to understand than the Wikipedia article!

If you have a report with custom filtering criteria, then you may have experienced frustration with QuickBase’s terse and unhelpful displaying of this information. QuickBase will show the first term of your filtering criteria in the blue bar above the report, followed by “AND…” It’s a suspense-building technique better left to soap opera cliffhangers than web database management software.
 
There’s no perfect fix for this limitation, but there is one way to get around it. Select “Print” from the mini-toolbar on the report. Leave the default option, “Print the report as a table.” Then, on the following screen, check the box labeled “include filtering criteria.” Click continue, and if a print window pops up, just cancel out of it. The window you’re left with should display your report with the full filtering criteria displayed just above it. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to share this more informative report, but if you’re desperate for a way to show your filter criteria then it may be just what you’re looking for!

You’ve probably never thought of typing the date as a particularly time-consuming activity, but if you create or modify a large number of records on a daily basis, then you’ve probably spent much more time than you realize scanning the calendar popup for the little highlighted box that represents today’s date. Lucky for you, there’s a little-known shortcut that will allow you to cut this minor hassle out of your daily life. Simply enter the date field and press the letter “t,” and QuickBase will insert today’s date for you. Or if it is a date/time field, press “n” (for “now”) and QuickBase will enter the current date and time. Maybe not mind-blowing, but hopefully it will make your daily life a little bit easier.

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.