QuickBase: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Creating Your Own Application

Even though QuickBase offers many well-designed application templates (Chapter 6), there are a bunch of reasons why you might want to create your own application from scratch. You may be building an application for something unusual. Say you need to catalog a museum’s rare butterfly collection and none of QuickBase’s templates quite fits. Or maybe you have a spreadsheet that you want to convert into a QuickBase application. You like the way the spreadsheet is set up, and you don’t want to spend time trying to make it fit into an application whose fields and records have already been defined. Or maybe you’ve decided to go from Microsoft Project to QuickBase for your project management needs, and you want to make the switch in the most painless way possible. Then again, you might want to design your own application just because you’re a do-it-yourselfer. Whatever your reason, designing and creating a QuickBase application is easy, even if you’ve never thought about how databases work. (And if you’re not quite sure what a database is, read the box in Databasics.)

This chapter shows you how to create single- and multi-table applications from scratch, and how to import data from other programs. (QuickBase can use data created in word processing, spreadsheet, and database programs. It can also pull in data from Microsoft Project.)

Tip

If you haven’t already, take a look at Chapter 5. It helps you analyze what you need in an application so you’ll have ...