February Release – User Customization and Conditional Dropdowns
Product release scheduled for Saturday, February 21 at 8am EST
I wanted to take a moment and let the QuickBase community know about some of the new features that will be coming out with the February product release scheduled for this Saturday, Feb. 21 at 8am.
“Reports” tab gets renamed “Home” tab
It’s more than just a new name. Our product team has added features that allow users to customize this new page even more. Now, in addition to adding your favorite reports you can also add free-form text boxes on your Home tab. You could use the boxes to add a quick list of favorite links, to-do lists, or even embed html, scripts, RSS or images from other websites. It’s like having the features your come to love about application dashboards right on your Home tab.
Conditional Dropdowns
For advanced users “conditional dropdowns” provide a new tool for improving usability and simplifying data entry. Application builders can now filter a dropdown choice by leveraging relationships. For example, if you have a long list of Cities, you can set it up so that the user selects the Country first, then the City dropdown is filtered by that Country. This is a popular request from our users and I know this feature will make the lives of app builders easier in a bunch of ways. Enjoy!
Still thirsty?
I’ll be posting some screen shots and links to support pages over the next couple of days. Those resources should give you a better sense of how these changes will allow you to get more out of QuickBase.
30 Trackbacks/Comments
Spence Lloyd on February 17, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Philip Gross on February 17, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Thanks, Spence. We’ve fixed it. Greg gets an A for effort on the blog post, but a B+ for spelling!
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Don Brake on February 18, 2009 at 10:07 am
Woohoo!!! Conditional drop-downs! How many hours have I spent on a workaround for this? Thanks, I look forward to seeing the additional functionality but this one will last me for a while 
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Scott Burday on February 18, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Can’t wait to finally be able to use conditional drop-downs. It has been a long time coming and has been our user’s #1 request.
With regards to the Reports “tab”. I have been using and developing in QuickBase for 7+ years and I am not sure I understand where this “tab” is. There is a Reports “sidebar”. Is that what you are referencing? I’ll look forward to seeing the screen shots to better understand this and what it can do.
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Ed Sanchez on February 18, 2009 at 6:07 pm
We have been seeing some performance issues. What is being done to address stability?
Also, the majority of our users are on black berry’s. Is anything being developed to provide us a text only email option?
Thanks
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Bill on February 18, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Can’t wait to use this new feature. Will we be able to use rolls or even a specific user as criteria for the conditions?
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John on February 18, 2009 at 7:51 pm
I’m so glad to hear about the conditional dropdowns. I would love to see some more Web 2.0ish features included. The functionality in QuickBase is fantastic but it can be a bit of a difficult sell to end users when it comes to the look of the interface. Keep the improvements coming. Thanks.
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Jim on February 18, 2009 at 7:51 pm
After the paragraph about the wonderful new features included in the Feb 21st update, your email says that “none of these changes will impact exsisting applications”. That’s a shame, conditional dropdowns would have been nice in my application, but I don’t have time to re-create it.
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Jared on February 18, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Jane on February 18, 2009 at 10:06 pm
I have a few special requests for future development:
1. Filtering to enable the auto generation of monthly reports (ex: at the end of Feb I’d like to get a report that shows all new accounts entered between Feb 1 and Feb 28).
2. Would be great if QuickBase could handle foreign language symbols such as the accent marks found in French and German. Also Japanese and Chinese characters.
3. Improve Exact Forms or develop a smooth, efficient way to print form letters from QuickBase. Needs to be compatible with Office 2007.
Thank you!
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Alan Lytle on February 18, 2009 at 10:08 pm
SO excited to hear about this upgrade! Conditional dropdowns!! Hooray!!! I’m doing the app developer happy dance! Thanks so much!!
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Arun Rao on February 18, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Can we see some screenshots of how conditional dropdowns are implemented? Can’t wait till 21st!
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Ramón on February 19, 2009 at 12:46 am
It has been vey long since we requested what we think would be the most important feature for quickbase expansion Worldwide and help our non-english spoken users: To be able to customize on a second language everything end users see (menus, messages, emails…..). Already on the roadmap?
Congratulations for the rest.
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Pam on February 19, 2009 at 6:15 am
It would really be nice to provide dropdowns that will allow for multiple selections. An example is when something impacts multiple countries, but in a dropdown, all you can select is one country form the list. Is this ever slated to be added?
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Vadim on February 19, 2009 at 8:15 am
Woot! Finally!
Jim: I’m sure they mean that it wont be enabled by default on existing applications. It wouldn’t be wise to create such a feature and not make sure it works with existing applications.
Jared:
1: Look into how to use subscriptions, all you have to do is create a report with what you want to see and then setup a subscription to get sent out monthly.
2: I’ve seen people use Japanese in their applications without a problem. Not sure if a setting needs to be turned on or simply your web browser can’t handle special characters and you need to change the Character encoding.
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Bill on February 19, 2009 at 9:58 am
As the developer of our company’s app, I would appreciate some features, tools to assist in managing the application itself such as:
Report showing user’s group memberships, and permissions.
Report to print out table structures.
An added text entry for each field to allow adding documentation about the field (what is it purpose/what it does), including calculated fields. With the ability to include this in a report for documentation.
Thanks for the conditional picklists though, that will be a great assist to our users.
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Al on February 19, 2009 at 10:23 am
Any word on when transitive lookups will be coming? They are absolutely, 100% critical – I have one table that has over 50 unnecessary lookup fields in it just so requirements of a client (table A) for whom projects are opened (table B) can be referenced in work orders (table C).
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Robert McDonald Reply:
May 27th, 2009 at 8:00 am
@Al,
Hi,
My name is Robert McDonald, QuickBase Product Manager, and I would love to talk to you more about your transitive lookup needs. Please email me at robert_mcdonald@intuit.com and we can set up a time for a quick conversation.
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Ton Jense on February 19, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Let me begin by complimenting Intuit for making a GREAT product. I have spent many hours developing three different releases of a Quickbase system and was able to achieve an enormous jump forward in supporting our primary process. But I also found out that there are some things Intuit consider changing. Let me explain why I come to this statement:
- Dates cannot be presented the European way (dd-mm-yyyy).
This is annoying because it leads to misinterpretation of date
values: To you 12-03-2008 means ‘december, 3 2008′ but for us it
is ‘march 12 2008′.
- Date fields cannot be made read-only. That is, if you do so, there
still is that calendar button, with which users can change a date
even when it has been made READ-ONLY.
- Amounts cannot be presented the European way (€ 9.999.999,99).
This is annoying because it leads to misinterpretation of those
values: € 2,300.00 means two thousand three hundred, but for us
it’s only two thirty.
- Amounts (and other numeric values) are always LEFT aligned.
This is annoying because we are used to RIGHT aligned numbers on the
decimal sign (for us that would be the comma).
- Field labels are always RIGHT aligned. Well, that’s all about taste.
I would love a possibility to LEFT align those labels……
- Fields are spread out the screenwidth if positioned next to each
other. I tried to improve the layout by inserting a blank section.
But then I get al lot of horizontal line where I do’n want them.
Why not choosing about a line for each indiviual section ?
- In the RULES section of a form we cannot use formula- or lookup
fields. This is the most frustrating disability. In my opinion
there is no (functional) need for this restriction. And althoug
I found a way to avoid this in some cases, it would be nice if
you could do something about it….
- There should be a way to produce documentation on a Quickbase
application. Names of Tables, Forms, Reports, Relations,
descriptions of fields, etc…. It’s all there (on screen), but
there is no simple way to export it to (for example) Word or
Excel….
- There’s a nice feature to color rows in a report….
Sometimes printing a report is needed. Unfortunately the colors
disappear when printed……
- Give us the tools to make real multitable queries instead of
cluttering up the database with dozens of lookup fields.
Conditional lookups are great. But why implementing a new release with only this feature in it? So far I am disappointed about the improvements I’ve seen implemented in the 1,5 year I use Quickbase….
And I think you could do a better job in managing the expectations of your customers. There seems to be no (public) roadmap, no releaseplan, not even a list of most wanted features…..
This is the second release this year with added functionality. And the second time I’m disappointed about the extra’s…..
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Roger on February 19, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I would also like to through a request for Images in the Custom Pages section. We have a number of icons that we are loading through the file attachment method. When you are a large system like we have become, this is pounding on the system. I am betting that the draw from a simple web query would be much less of a performance impact.
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Jesse on February 20, 2009 at 10:03 am
Heidi on February 20, 2009 at 1:27 pm
As our company’s app builder, I also am very excited about the conditional dropdowns. You guys are always improving QuickBase- Thank you!!!
I also would like to see multiple selection dropdowns, which is a very common practice among other apps, and would make my life MUCH easier with the development, which I’m sure will come in time.
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Vadim on February 20, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Guys, keep in mind that if you would like to request new features you need to do so by entering a support case. Posting it here will probably not get noticed by the developers.
Go to http://service.quickbase.com/updates.aspx and click on “Enter Support Case”
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Eric on February 21, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Sounds great! Where are the help notes or general instructions? I noticed the introduction on YouTube, but still no general instruction.
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Eric on February 21, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Here are the help notes in case anyone is looking for them…
https://www.quickbase.com/help/default.html#conditional_dropdowns.html
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Soumya De on February 22, 2009 at 10:12 am
Hi — I am one of the engineers on the QuickBase team who worked on the conditional dropdown feature. Some of you have been wondering how you set this up. Well, here is the link to the help article.
https://www.quickbase.com/help/default.html#conditional_dropdowns.html
We are also aware of a bug that does not allow you to use conditional dropdowns in a grid edit view within a form. We will be fixing this shortly as well. However, it should work fine in a field on the form itself as well as the standalone grid edit view.
This has been an oft requested feature and it was fun working on it. I hope some of you get value out of it.
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Ivan on February 22, 2009 at 10:25 am
Still no improvements for european users (date format)?
When we can get this?
Ivan
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Dina Erstejn on February 23, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I came into this site to change name of person registered for training tomorrow, Fe. 24. Apparently, I cannot do it on this screen.
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Ramón on February 24, 2009 at 5:05 am
Dear Ton, great post!!. I agree QUICKBASE is a GREAT GREAR product (and I can tell you we have used it since 2003 and I am the bisggest supporter) but until now they have forgotten about us, the European users and the non-english spoken which is something that really surprises me !!!!. The Roadmap is also a mistery. Maybe we should make an UE lobby Regards.
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Richard Sullivan on February 25, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Here, here to Ton Jense’s requests in this blog. The date format issue is particularly important for me and I have lost opportunities because of it.
Also, there should be an option where the area code character numbers can be changed, ie. here area codes are only two digits, but QB automatically makes them three digits. This is a source of confusion here as landline phone numbers are very different from cell phone numbers, both starting with a 0. Cell phones don’t have area codes here, so having the option of no brackets for a number would be very handy.
Regards, Richard in Australia
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