Today’s Tip: Click Right

By jsalem | Posted on June 13th, 2005

Here is another installment in my occassional series of "secret" QuickBase UI tips.

When people ask me for help trying to do something in Windows, one of my most common pieces of advice is to "Click Right". As in, "click the right-hand mouse button." In Windows, this generally brings up a context menu of useful actions related to the thing you’ve clicked on.

This advice applies to QuickBase as well. In several places, we’ve replaced the browsers’ standard right click menu with a QuickBase-specific menu of shortcuts to common tasks. While there’s nothing on these menues that you can’t do in some other way, they can be a nice time-saver.

I think the most useful "right click" is on a field’s name in a form or a view. You need to have administrative access to the application. The resulting menu will let you edit that field’s properties or edit the form. Not only can this save time, it can help you avoid mistakes, especially in applications with lots of fields.

Other right click menues can be found in Grid Edit and on the My QuickBase page. These menues appear in both IE and Firefox.

Enjoy!

– Jim

P.S., Some people (including me at times) are annoyed that the standard
browser right click menu has been replaced. As you can guess, it’s a
trade off — we’re betting that the average user will get more benefit
from the custom QuickBase menu than the browser’s standard menu.