Gain more insight by summarizing text fields

Quickbase app builders often use summary fields to provide quick insights. For instance, they can show the total cost of a customer order, the estimated value of all open opportunities for a sales rep, or the most recent inspection date for a piece of equipment. But have you ever wanted to summarize a text field? 

In the December release, we put even more power into your hands by improving summary fields, so they can combine text from child records. 

In the example below, summarizing the product name from each line item lets us quickly browse and search the parent Orders table to see who's ordered a specific product.


To create a text summary field, simply choose the new Combined Text option when creating a summary field.




These new summary fields work the same way you're used to, only displaying information for child records your end users have permission to see. You can also add matching criteria to summarize text from specific child records rather than from all related child records. These fields are technically Multi-select Text fields, so they display and work the same way. The fields display values from up to 25 child records, with up to 64 characters per value. Duplicate values are automatically removed.