Qrew Meetup Notes July 2024

Attendees: Jen Clark, Elena Larabee, Lee Gilmore, Diego Alvarez, Jim Harrison

We met at 3PM on the forth Wednesday of July. The only downside was I forgot to renew the Teams invite for Tammie King and she didn't join us. Apolgies Tammie! Moving forward, I have added Tammie to all future Qrew meetups and she has already accepted. Another productive meeting we mainly focused on styling Rich Text Fields.

First Diego showed what he made using the Rich Text functions method Jen had shown last month. During the June Qrew meetup, Jen Clark displayed how she uses Quick Base Formula conditions to apply HTML styling to rich text fields. Diego was inspired to create his own conditional styling and this month he showed his work. Diegos field is based upon the values in other fields. Depending on those fields values, the Rich Text field changes color and shows one or more lines of text. The use case then displays the field in a report and provides Users with action items to be completed. As the Action Items are completed the text disappears from the Rich Text field. The field is taking information from multiple fields and condensing it into a single field, meaning the report has fewer columns with the same amount of information.

Next Jen had questions regarding using tables in Rich Text Fields. Jen is learning HTML "on the fly" and needed some assistance in the finer details. We reviewed the properties of the table element and covered syntax. We also looked at using App Variables to style the different elements (table, th, tr, td) and she quickly started to add to the Rich Text experience. Within a few minutes the Rich Text field had been transformed from words in a cell to a formatted table with fat red borders; Jen was having fun! We left Jen to her styling and moved on to a problem Elena brought to the table.

Elena had questions on formatting a table into a "Safety Cross". She wound up teaching us all a thing or two about using ChatGPT. The styling problem is easy to solve with plenty of reiterative CSS; make a change, update the table, save and reload. Instead Elena chose to use ChatGPT to style the table properties. We learned there are nuances to getting the correct answer. The nuance is in asking the question and modifying parameters and requirements sent to the LLM (Large Language Model) .We still have to know the syntax of the code in order to verify it is properly formatted but all the little changes one makes when styling are handled by ChatGPT. The result in this example is a lot less scanning HTML for mistakes.

It is these moments of discovery and sharing that make these meetings so important. Each of us are on our own journey to learning Quickbase development. Together we improve our capabilites. While we were all excited and talking about using ChatGPT I realized the time and called and end to another Qrew meetup.

We headed out for some Pocket Pub minus Diego (who is not in Portland) and Elena who had other obligations. Lee, Jen and I continued our conversation around Quickbase as well as other topics.