Lightweight Apps & Sweet Potatoes

By Alex Chriss | Posted on August 10th, 2005

QuickBase is now embedded so deep in my brain, I just can’t escape it. Case and point -Saturday morning I was reading a book about how to start our four-month-old eating solid foods.  There were rules upon rules to make sure your child ate the right variety of foods, at the right time, with the right precautions and monitoring in place to watch for allergic reactions.  There were complex formulas for the amount of food based on body weight, the consistency of food based on the amount of liquids drunk during the day, and how much additional liquids your infant might need post food.  YIKES!  Plus, all of this was complicated by the fact that there would be at least two of us feeding him at potentially different times and sometimes without the possibility of communication

So the maverick side of me said, “ah, he’ll be fine, let’s start with peanut butter – peanut butter is GOOD..mmmm…)  And the responsible, overly-protective side of me (known as my wife), said – let’s get a piece of paper and keep track.  But that just wasn’t going to work.  So in about half an hour I whipped up a perfectly fantastic QuickBase, complete with a schedule of foods (Sweet Potatoes first for a week, then Banana’s), and e-mail notifications to keep each of us informed on feeding progress.  We can even track his perceived enjoyment of the food (i.e. did he spit ALL of it out or just some of it) and share it with family members who love this sort of ridiculous detail. 

So the point is, QuickBase is pretty cool and can be used in SO many different ways!  At Intuit for example, we use QuickBase for a variety of lightweight business applications such as a flu-shoot database, tracking summer outings, vacation logging, etc.  Without QuickBase, tracking this information across an entire organization would be time-consuming and a general pain.  But with QuickBase it takes almost no time at all to create an application that can run the entire process.  Are any of you using QuickBase for some of these lightweight business applications for your organization? Let us know!