QuickBase Straight Up

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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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!

Q. Whenever I create a report, I see that yellow “New” flag on the far left. Can you get rid of that?

A. You can clear them from a report once you generate the report by clicking on “Other” in the blue bar at the top of the report, and then on “Clear the New and Updated Flags.” However, next time you run the report, if there are new records, the flags will be back  — there is no way to eliminate them permanently.