by Peter Fearey under Inside QuickBase

OK, so, I can’t help but ask… have you used the new features? If so, what do you think? If not, why not?

I think the most comments have been on Cross-Application relationships. Just had an interesting call this morning with someone talking about when to use the Cross-Application Relationships feature and when to use Import from Table. He was looking for consolidated reporting between two similar (but distinct) applications. Quickly… think of it as wanting to report on products from division A and division B, where they each sell different products. He could either have a QuickBase "product" application that was related to his Division A application and his Division B application, then do summaries for executives from the product application. Or he could use Import from Table whenever he needed the reporting done. Either way worked for his situation, so it depended on how he wanted to manage it… managing relationships or managing an import. I think he’s going to start with the relationships and see how that goes.

I haven’t heard many comments on Cross-Tab Views, which surprises me. They were requested often, so fill us in with your stories. Is it what you wanted/expected?

And, we do have our first "for Corporations" customers up and running. One we got going in less than two days! And we’ve have a line of customers "fixing to start" (as we say in Arkansas!), as we work together to get hooked into their Directory Servers.

We’ve gotten some positive and helpful feedback so far, but we always want more, so please fill us in when you get a chance.

Hope you all had great holiday, and we look forward to working with you to define the next release!

by Alex Chriss under QuickBase Advice & Tips

In working with customers over the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself suggesting one feature over and over that I think we often forget about – Append Only.  No, I’m Serious!  The append/prepend is such a cool function that gets overlooked. 

I use append with a text or text multi-line field especially in situation where I want a dialogue between multiple people (think Q&A between team members on a specific task).  The date and person stamp makes the audit trail easy.  But did you know that you could also use an append field with a Multiple Choice field?  Each time a choice is saved, the date and person is again stamped and you get a running history of selections.  I’ve used this recently with a customer who needed to track the status of tasks with lots of different people touching the records and making changes.  They needed a visible history and the append function worked well.