Forum Discussion

MichaelTamoush's avatar
MichaelTamoush
Qrew Captain
5 years ago

Creative way for users to import data?

I have a child table with multiple fields, but only 3 of interest in my use case. Part Description, Quantity, and Unit Cost, Related Project.

My users have spreadsheets they are emailed from external sources, with columns that match (excluding related Project).

It would be very easy for me to import. However, I want the users to be able to import on their own. Any creative way to do this?

The best I have come up with is having an editable report link on the child table, using Firefox and copy paste from Excel to the report link in edit mode. This works, but the limitation is you can only copy/paste 4 items at a time. My users may have as many as 20.

I'm thinking about seeing if there is some way to use a pipeline and have them upload the excel sheet to a box drive or something, or maybe email it, but that all seems more involved than it needs to be?

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Mike Tamoush
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Data import and export
  • MarkShnier__You's avatar
    MarkShnier__You
    Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend
    5 years ago
    I have two ideas. The first one may be too tricky for your users to master, but if you highlight those bottom flour empty rows at the bottom of the embedded grid edit report and then you right click you can insert more rows. The four rows double to be 8 rows.  Then highlight those eight rows, You can right click and have them double to be 16.  repeat and you get 32 blank rows.  The tricky part about the highlighting is you have to click just right on the left-hand edge of the embedded grid edit report. 

    The other thing you can do as you can make a button which will create say five more empty rows every time they click the button. So you just tell them to click as many times as they need to make the target bigger. Then they would have a nice big target to paste into. Essentially they would be over writing records which are blanks.

    I suppose each night you could have an automation go through and delete all the blank rows.


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    Mark Shnier (YQC)
    Quick Base Solution Provider
    Your Quick Base Coach
    http://QuickBaseCoach.com
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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    • MichaelTamoush's avatar
      MichaelTamoush
      Qrew Captain
      5 years ago
      Both good ideas Mark. I'll probably use one of those, however - is using the copy paste idea (with FireFox or IE only...) about the only way for a user to actually get the data in?

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      Mike Tamoush
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      • MarkShnier__You's avatar
        MarkShnier__You
        Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend
        5 years ago
        So depends how much work you want to do. When I have clients who are routinely Importing data from another system where the data needs to be transformed in some way either with filters or simply to control the mapping, I have done it using a table in QuickBase where they can enter their data.  Case they would paste the raw data in from their spreadsheet external system and I am assuming that all the spreadsheets are of the same format. They would have to choose a parent record from a drop-down list. And then they would push a button and it would run an API_RunImport  to copy these over to the child table attached to the correct parent.

        If the traffic for those imports was going to be quite infrequent then Import table could be on a single record because the users wouldn't be bumping into each other. But if there's too much chance that the users are going to trip over each other than it could be a table of users so that each user has their own record to paste into.

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        Mark Shnier (YQC)
        Quick Base Solution Provider
        Your Quick Base Coach
        http://QuickBaseCoach.com
        mark.shnier@gmail.com
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