QuickBase Straight Up

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!

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!

Keep in mind that when you upload images, they will have to be in one of those formats in order to display on the page. Also remember that images take up more disk space than simple data fields. You can see how much space they are taking up under Customize–>Application–>Misc.–>Show Application Statistics.

Images in Reports

You probably noticed the little addendum to the “Display Images” checkbox which reads “(single record display only)”. This means that when you attach an image to a record, it will only display when you are viewing the individual record. QuickBase makes it seem as if there is no way to get a list of image thumbnails to display on a report. Fortunately, there is a solution.

First, find out what the field ID of your image attachment field is. This can be done by viewing all your fields under the Customize menu and checking the Field ID column. Next, create another new field in your table of type Formula - Text and call it something like “Image Display.” Edit this field and check the box called “Allow some HTML tags.” Then, copy and paste the following code into the formula box:

“<img width=\”50\” src=\”" & URLRoot() & “up/” & Dbid () & “/a/r” & [Record ID#] & “/e10/v0\” />”

Replace the number after e with the field ID of your file attachment field, and replace the 50 at the beginning with the width you want your thumbnails to be scaled to. Add the Image Display field to your report, and you’ve got yourself a nice list of thumbnails. You can also hide the file attachment field, because it’s rather unnecessary at this point. Thanks to forum user Gareth Lewis for this tip!