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JulieBowers1's avatar
JulieBowers1
Qrew Trainee
7 months ago

Example of help documents in an app

Hi community!

We have a table in one of our apps that stores help documents to help the people taking calls with certain call types or sub call types.

The table has a text field for key words which is populated by the person responsible for the help document. The idea for this field is that it's a combination of words that a person would search for in order to find that document.

The users have complained that this is not the best user experience.

I noticed that whomever built the app (this was before I joined this org) had put a Search Articles button on the ticket form. As you can see from the formula below it doesn't tie to the call type/sub call type. I think it was built this way because some of the documents don't tie to a call/sub call type but rather are more general about a subject. 

URLRoot() & "db/" & [_DBID_SOPS___RESOURCES] & "?a=td"

Has anyone ever stored help documents in one of their apps? I'm hoping for examples so that I can work on improving the user experience on this.



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Julie Bowers
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  • MarkShnier__You's avatar
    MarkShnier__You
    Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend
    7 months ago

    A best kept secret of Quickbase is that it can search within documents. The doc types include the usual Microsoft type documents, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and probably pure text document attachments.

    To enable this feature you need to go to the advanced settings for the Table and enable indexing of file attachments.

    Documents get indexed within a minute or two of uploading, typically, but if you have a table which has not been indexed, it may take overnight to scan all those documents.

    then you can do an ask the user type search, and there will be an option where some attached file contains the word or contains the word that begins with <ask the user>

    give that a try and see if that allows for more generalized search. Note also that to the degree you can train your users in any search in QuickBase whether it be a normal report filter or column filter. You can use the word OR in uppercase as well as the word AND up on multiple keywords. Typically the one that would get used would be AND



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    Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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    • JulieBowers1's avatar
      JulieBowers1
      Qrew Trainee
      7 months ago

      Mark! Thank you so much! I didn't know about the indexing. I've turned that on and will test in a day or so since it doesn't appear you can tell when indexing is complete. 

      And thank you for the reminder on teaching users how to search. For some reason, I hadn't thought of telling them to use OR or AND. 

      Thank you thank you thank you!



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      Julie Bowers
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