I spent some time this morning looking at how a variety of businesses are adapting their approach to continue to live their mission in this new reality. My son's elementary school is holding physical...
Published 5 years ago
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I can' t think of anything to specifically help us in the current environment, but there are a couple things in general I could use:
1. Enhanced email subscriptions that can go straight to our customers (who do not have Quick Base access).
Example: Right now I have a report that needs to be sent to several different construction coordinators that are part of our customer's company. Each coordinator has their own report. As of now, we have an email address set up through our organization where each report gets sent, then we have email rules set up to forward it to the specific coordinator. This takes several steps to set up a new coordinator.
2. Salesforce has a feature where you can download a report that is formatted instead of just a CSV. So if I'm in my customer's system I can do that, but not in our system.
3. Ability to edit the logs to text fields that have logging enabled. Some of them can become messy, if they are rich text fields.
4. Built in holidays. Declare your company's holidays so the WeekdayAdd/WorkdayAdd will automatically count them.
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Dwight Munson
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1. Enhanced email subscriptions that can go straight to our customers (who do not have Quick Base access).
Example: Right now I have a report that needs to be sent to several different construction coordinators that are part of our customer's company. Each coordinator has their own report. As of now, we have an email address set up through our organization where each report gets sent, then we have email rules set up to forward it to the specific coordinator. This takes several steps to set up a new coordinator.
2. Salesforce has a feature where you can download a report that is formatted instead of just a CSV. So if I'm in my customer's system I can do that, but not in our system.
3. Ability to edit the logs to text fields that have logging enabled. Some of them can become messy, if they are rich text fields.
4. Built in holidays. Declare your company's holidays so the WeekdayAdd/WorkdayAdd will automatically count them.
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Dwight Munson
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- I completely agree with the holidays thing! My team just last week had to write a script to account for all holidays in a duration field. Would have been so much more efficient if this was included as a formula type in QB.
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Ursula
------------------------------- We have a table dedicated to years and the holidays within them. We have to relate them to any table where we need to account for holidays in two steps, Holiday for Current Year and Holidays for Next Year. So since we have 6 holidays, that's 14 related fields, plus we have some placeholders for if we add a holiday or two.
Then we declare a variable to account for the holidays in any formula date fields.
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Dwight Munson
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- I don't work for QB, but I might have a few ideas on how to accomplish these items using current functionality.
1. I believe there is an option to send email subscriptions to email addresses that don't have access. What about that doesn't work?
2. You can link Excel to Quick Base, format it, then simply refresh the connection to get the latest data. That's what I do for formatted reports, deliverables with multiple reports, reports I want to do data transformations on in Excel or turn into charts, etc. It's a bit tricky to get working, but once you figure it out, it's very convenient. Here's a couple links for more info: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickbase/topics/automatic-export-from-quickbase-into-excel
http://www.kimgentes.com/worshiptech-web-tools-page/2010/8/18/web-connecting-csv-files-as-external-data-to-excel-spreadshe.html
For your connection use a URL in the general format of https://yoursite.quickbase.com/db/YOUR_DATABASE?act=API_GenResultsTable&usertoken=YOUR_USER_TOKEN&options=tsv&qid=YOUR_QUERY_ID
3. Agreed, these fields are kind of a pain, and I've also wanted to make some administrative edits to them in the past myself. Overall though, I find there are better way to track changes. I personally have a change log table which has fields for the table and field that was changed, old and new values, when it was changed, and who changed it. You can then show the changes for specific fields (or all fields, if you like) as a report link, run reports to get changes during date ranges, count all changes, etc. I use a webhook to drive mine, but you could probably use an automation or pipeline instead. You just need something to log the change info to the change log table whenever there's a change.
4. I'd also find this useful. Maybe you should suggest it on the User Voice forum? It sounds like you'd get some support.
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Kat Valentine
------------------------------- Hi Dwight,
Kat is spot on with 1,2, and 3. Thank you Kat!
Josh Kaylor (your CSM) should be hopping in here shortly to provide some additional help beyond user voice on #4.
Thanks!
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Neil Forbes
------------------------------- Hi Dwight,
As Kat mentioned, suggesting this in User Voice is a great way to make things happen. Until then, try the following for #4.
Create a many-to-many relationship to a dates table. Put in 10 years worth of days and set the date as the key field.
In the dates table you can have checkbox fields to denote weekdays and holidays.
Then create an automation that runs when you modify a record in your original table. It will copy records from the Master Dates table to the join table. Filter out holidays and weekends using the checkbox fields you created and filter the dates as >= Start Date and <= End Date.
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Josh Kaylor
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