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New Table Reports - GA Launch

By Alice Rich posted 04-08-2021 18:58

  

New Table Reports - GA Launch 


As you may have heard over the last year, we are currently in the middle of a multi-year journey to refresh the entire user interface of the Quick Base platform.

This has lots of benefits. It will provide a more modern and consistent product experience, prepare us for future support of international characters and accessibility, and speed up our delivery of new features in the long term. Read more about that here.

Today, I'm excited to announce that the first major feature of the UI Refresh, our new table report, is officially ready to enter General Availability! With this GA launch, the toggle at the top of your table reports with switch from defaulting off, to defaulting on.

Read on to learn about the specifics of this launch, a few feature highlights, and what we have planned next. 

The road to get here

Our brand-new table report experience has been built from the ground up to provide a more modern and intuitive way for you to get insights from your data. And since table reports lie at the heart of so many Quickbase interactions we wanted to make sure we took the time to get things right. 

Development first began on the new table report nearly 2 years ago.

We started our initial beta program in October of 2019 and invited over 1000 accounts to try things out before launching our first ever open beta program in June of 2020 at Empower. This added the "New style (beta)" toggle on all Quickbase table reports and allowed any user that was interested to try things out.

Since we started this program we have gotten a ton of engagement. In that time, we've gotten around 500,000 clicks on the toggle to enable the new table report. Those clicks are spread across 145 thousand unique visitors in over 7,800 accounts. All of that equates to over 200,000 new table reports loaded every single day.

All this activity has helped us make informed choices along the way based on feedback from our wonderful community.

So, thank you to everyone who took a survey, participated in a usability session, or submitted feedback. You have been an invaluable part of this process.


Here are a few of the exciting features you helped shape: 


Sleek new look, same great table report

Leverage the full width of the page, now that dynamic filters have moved to the top of the report. We've also made some improvements in response to your feedback to improve readability.

 

Use our new full-screen mode to maximize your screen real estate.



Set the density of records for even more control over the appearance of your reports.




Put your best foot forward using our more subtle, stylish color coding. Applications you build reflect on you, and we want you to look your best - capable, professional, and definitely not boring.



If you need something a little stronger, feel free to switch to our full-color option to really grab your users' attention. Enable it in the report builder.



Get work done faster

Clean up clutter with nested record grouping. When you group a new table report on several fields, each level of grouping will be nested within the group above it. You can even collapse all groups at once to find what you need right away.


Do you work with reports that include many pages of data? Now you can switch between pages quickly, using page controls that are always visible at the bottom.




Download your report as a spreadsheet in one click, now that we’ve pulled the download option out of the more menu.


Boost adoption of your apps

Your colleagues will get comfortable with your apps more quickly, now that they can quickly adjust their display by re-sizing columns. And no worries, we'll remember your choices the next time you visit the same report so you don't have to adjust them a second time.


One of the most powerful interactions Quickbase offers is the ability to quickly and easily filter your data to find what's important to you. The new table report offers two different filtering options to provide faster insights.

First, our column filters offer maximum flexibility so users can filter on any column as they would in a spreadsheet. 




At the same time, our filter bar displays the same dynamic filters builders have hand-selected on legacy reports to provide more workflow-driven focus.





Rollout Details: 

Now, let's get into the logistics. With our GA launch, the toggle at the top of your table reports with switch from defaulting off, to defaulting on as I mentioned above.

This means the new style will become the default experience, but the toggle will still be around in case you need to make exceptions to toggle back to the old style. We'll also remember that choice, so the next time you view that same report it will remain in the style you left it in.

Since this is such a big change and the first of its kind, we're planning to roll this out in phases. These phases will be based on the first letter of your Quickbase URL (“https://examplecorp.quickbase.com“ would start with the letter “e”.)

The first phase will begin on 04/26/21 where we'll default on the first ~25% of our accounts. Then, we have a week built in to monitor performance before resuming with our second phase on May 10th. After that we'll default on another 25% of accounts each week until we complete our rollout.

We'll closely monitor each phase of the rollout, and may adjust the dates for the following phases as needed. We’ll keep this page up-to-date if any of the rollout dates change.

Here's a more detailed outline of those phases:

Phase

Date

Segments

Phase 1

04/26/21

Customers with URLs beginning with a d

No additional phase

05/03/21

Monitoring performance

Phase 2

05/10/21

Customers with URLs beginning with e m

Phase 3

05/17/21

Customers with URLs beginning with n s

Phase 4

05/24/21

Customers with URLs beginning with t z and all others (accounts who don't start with a letter of the alphabet)



In my example above, a company with the Quickbase URL “https://examplecorp.quickbase.com“ would see their table reports begin defaulting to the new style on 05/10/21 because their URL begins with the letter “e“.

This GA rollout also marks the next milestone for a few features we are retiring this year. Read more about that here.

If you have any questions or concerns on this feel free to submit a support case and we'll get you sorted out.


What's Next:

This GA milestone doesn't mean we'll stop working on the new table report. Far from it. After our GA rollout, we'll be paying close attention to bugs that are reported and feedback we receive about what's not working well so we can quickly resolve issues that may arise.

We'll also take time to tie up a few loose ends like adding in features like "new subscription" and "add to favorites" that are important, but less-used functionality.

And last, but not least, we also have a number of net-new enhancements we're also planning to add in like the ability to display totals and averages right in line in our collapsible grouping rows.

 Thinking ahead much later, once we're satisfied the new table report is full-featured and complete and we've given everyone plenty of warning, we will remove the toggle and the new table report will just become the table report. We anticipate this won't happen until months in the future. I mention it here purely to illustrate our eventual goal.


Giving Feedback

As I said before, your feedback is a critical part of our process. Whether you love it, or you’ve found something we’ve missed, it’s all essential to help us make the best table reports possible. Please continue to post your ideas on our Uservoice feedback forum, and vote for other ideas you like.

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