Choose your own complexity
October 05, 2016
Choose your own complexity
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
We use Quickbase for our portfolio management. We have built out a project management app to track a number of project metrics and run a variety of reports.
- Highly customizable.
- The ability to have multiple related tables is very helpful. This allows you to have multiple records from one table linked to another table.
- The ability to use formulas in custom fields is very powerful. Sometimes this takes some advanced knowledge and programming experience, but it really helps extend the functionality of the tool.
- It would be great to be able to move records in a table up and down from a report view. I would like to be able to sort the report by rank without having to manually update a custom field on each project.
- I would like to be able to execute a query based on the historical value of a custom field. For example, to look for a record that was in a specified state last week, but is no longer in that state.
- It would be nice to be able to edit a report inline without having to use grid edit. For example, instead of opening up edit to all fields in the report (current grid edit function) allow editing on a single field for a single record.
- I would like to be able to set custom column widths in a report. Also fields should be able to wrap based on my selected column widths.
The maintenance requirements really depend on how complicated you make your apps. Iff you use a lot of custom fields and formulas, the maintenance of your app can require a significant amount of expertise. We have made great use of Quickbase, but our team is very technical.
Other applications I have used have a more specific focus and are designed to use almost out of the box with less customization. Quickbase provides more customizability than some of the other apps I have used or evaluated, but there is definitely more setup and maintenance.
The difficulty level really depends on your implementation. If you have a large number of roles with varying permissions requirements, the permissioning can be very complicated. Also if you use a lot of formulas in custom fields, the syntax and debugging of your formulas can be significant. We have a fairly complex setup and don't require any IT support to maintain. Everyone on my team has programmed at some level in the past. For a less technical group, building and maintaining an app would be more difficult or you would have a less robust app.
- Improving our ability to drive insights from our data
- Improving collaboration across one or more teams
- Solving a specific business challenge
- Building and deploying an application (or multiple applications) that meets our exact needs
We use a lot of custom fields with many related tables. Our primary form is very long and sometimes we want to only focus on a small section of the form. In order to improve workflow, I created several new forms that are a subset of the full form for the table we use to track our projects. I was able to create custom fields that can display as buttons in my reports to invoke these alternate forms using the for id. I used the URL type formula in a custom field and concatenated our base Quickbase URL with the record id and form id (dfid). I used a Google search to figure out how to reference the form id. It was easy to implement and speeds up our workflow when we only want to focus on a specific set of fields within our larger form.