QuickBase - The triumph of common sense over technical training.
April 05, 2017
QuickBase - The triumph of common sense over technical training.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with QuickBase
QuickBase is used by several departments. The most prevalent use is for aggregation of data from IT systems, and dispersion to those without access to the primary database.
- Ability to gather large pools of data, 700K to 1M+ rows within an app.
- Access to users, without regard to their status in the network, their device, or platform.
- Relatively easy to learn basic app creation.
- Graphing is the Achilles heel of QuickBase. Specifically not being in control of the details. For instance, where the legend is situated and what elements it displays. Also, the color of lines and bars change for no apparent reason. These "insignificant" aspects loom large when producing reports for C-staff.
- The lack of global filtering on home-pages is frustrating, as is the limited number of reports allowed per page.
Absolutely, we can respond to requests within days, sometimes hours. As opposed to
IT which might take months just to decide whether or not to do it, and months to a year
to actually accomplish.
IT which might take months just to decide whether or not to do it, and months to a year
to actually accomplish.
QuickBase is the best value when you factor cost, learning curve, quality of output, and scalability.
I personally came to QuickBase as a neophyte. No coding experience, barely any in Excel, I couldn't even spell SQL. There were challenges, but between the QuickBase community and Intuit's staff, I had the support I needed. I found our IT infrastructure (all good people) to be more of an impediment than of assistance. The time to build or maintain apps is completely dependent on the scope of the apps. I've built an app in a day that turns a three day job into a ten minute job. I have built an app that took six months dev time but it has been running for six years without any maintenance beyond adding/deleting users.
- Building and deploying business applications faster
- 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 have achieved all of these goals. I'm not saying every app was an unqualified success. We had an anti-QB attitude with some people in the organization. What I have heard many times as they convert to pro-QB is "I didn't realize how much it depends on who builds the apps." The fact that you can do almost anything leads you to want to say yes to everyone. There are best practices and one ignores them at one's own peril. You can't keep building on an app as if it were the Winchester mansion, you must be able to say no, offer other possibilities. I think they call it "people skills".
Despite the fact that "QuickBase is designed to make it easy to update and maintain" if you try hard enough, you can make it difficult. Understand on the front end what kind of changes are likely to take place. Through the development keep change and maintenance in mind. After I built an app with user fields in six different tables, I learned that it's much easier to maintain one user field with a relationship to the other fields. People do tend to come and go. Early on I thought that the more roles you have in an app, the cooler it is. Then along comes a situation that compels you to reset permissions and UIs and you learn that it most cases, less roles are better. The more time you invest in researching and mapping and prior planning, the better your long-term experience will be.