October 2024 Qrew Meetup Notes

Qrew meeting attendees: Elena, Diego, Jim, Lee, Nico, Jen, Pierce

Nico Cantillo a Customer Success Manager from Quickbase joined the PDX Qrew this month. It's an observation that all the Quickbase representatives I have met in the past few months are curious and interested. I find they are asking questions about our experience and looking for feedback. Some questions came up around our opinion of Empower Pro, what did we like/dislike and of course to Give Feedback. Quickbase'interest and engagement does not go unnoticed.

We started out the meeting with Introductions all round. After introductions we each shared our progress or improvements in the previous month.

Diego began with updates he is making to Dashboards. Recent Quickbase updates to Dashboards, we have been adjusting our Dashboards from the "New Style" to the "New New Style". The layouts have changed and we have noticed performance problems causing additional testing and changes to the previous design. For example, it used to be that displaying a report on a Dashboard didn't cause the Dashboard to hang for seconds on load. Since the updates, we are removing reports from Dashboards to improve load time performance. One observation is the "Performance Monitor" doesn't work on Dashboards, so there is no low-code way to tell the Builder what is causing the load problem. In some Apps we have Dashboards that act as "single pane of glass" experiences for Roles and there are several Roles in the App. Diego, as well as others on the HMC Team are busy with these modifications.

Stemming from a question of whether Dashboard tabs on top are an improvement, we moved away from introductions for a little bit. We talked about Give Feedback and some of the experiences with that feature of the Quickbase platform. Anyone who spends more that fifteen minutes looking at Give Feedback finds ideas that have been untouched for years, other ideas are closed almost immediately without a way to respond. Give Feedback is hard for Users to find and one cannot share links without problems for anyone who clicks the link. Lastly the frustration around convincing Quickbase Support there is a problem only to be told to go create a Give Feedback. This behavior makes the Customer have to duplicate the same work in two places. Nico was very nice and created a Give Feedback regarding the tabs on Dashboards taking up the space gained by removing the Global table bar (Quickbase giveth and Quickbase taketh away. :)

Next Lee gave an update on progress last month to say he is traveling quite a bit. He did have a problem, which we got to after the updates portion of the meeting.

Jen said last month was about trying to rework a summary report to pull averages from a specific static time period (which is not the native functionality). We did some brainstorming on better ways to get there with a formula, and she was able to sort it out the next day. No update on the Fastfield buildout. Finally she is excited about new mobile forms but needs embedded reports to be included before migration can begin. The builders who use embedded reports and Grid Edit all agreed this is a show stopper for migration.

Jim has been working mostly in SQL updating a QuNect Stored Procedure to use unique fields to perform bulk imports. The goal is to reduce Integration Reads and speed up processes significantly. This is a long term transition as there are many automations using the loop method to add/update records, all which need to be switched to the bulk import method.

Elena was excited to share something interesting. She showed her method of using an iFrame to load a Code Page that has features outside of the Quickbase feature set and also uses Parameters. The iframe displays a report. In the report is a button. When the button is clicked, it opens a pop-up window with a Drop Down List. The pop-up list looks modern and has some features like showing what is already selected. We talked about using "OpenAsAPopUp" and ifv but the limitations on native Quickbase Drop Down List styling could not be ignored.

Pierce shared he is working on redirects. The challenges associated with getting redirects to work in different situations.  Pierce is one of the newer Quickbase builders at HMC and has more SQL experience, which is greatly needed and appreciated.

We then briefly talked about changing the Qrew meetup dates by advancing one week for November and December. The change was agreed upon unanimously.

Next we moved on to a problem Lee wanted to work on. He has this complex formula that determines the editability of a field based upon a date range. Diego put a solution in the Teams chat that hopefully Lee can modify to meet the requirements. If not I have a feeling November PDX Qrew will be working on the formula, which sounds like a good time.

We ended the meeting and called it a day.

side notes:

We often have this conversation about Quickbase UI/UX limitations. When a customer reaches the limits of Quickbase, one option is to move into Code Pages, if they decide to stick with Quickbase. There is a comprimise to Code Page or not to Code Page and each organization should consider this seriously. The queston is: If we move to Code Pages, we either need to get good at reading the language in the Code Page or Pay someone to help maintain it for us. I think it is an interesting long term conversation. I also think it is essential to have the Code Page as an option.