Whare are everyones thoughts on the new switch to Upgraded Dashboards?I had just spent a year making Dashboards (they are great), and now suddenly they upgraded the design (tabs on top and a bit of a different look).I like the new look, but I already built quite a few with the old look, and my users just got used to the tabs on the bottom. I am creating my last dashboard, and BOOM, it defaults and forces you to the new style (when creating a new dashboard).There is a cheat code (copy an old style dashboard), but this seems to be another example of Quickbase simply not listening to the end user any more. I do like the new design, and will likely eventually switch, but to force the issue immediately without warning, feels rough. It makes consistency in my apps very difficult.What do others think?

Just to echo what Jim said above. New forms and new style email notifications work pretty well together. So I also have a client where we set up a record in a table with a single record in it. We put the key measures on that form. And then we send an email Out each day. But in my situation with this client, there were not that many different key measures. So it's not like we had a dashboard full of KPI widgets. but thinking out loud I wonder if it's possible to embed an iframe of a dashboard onto a new form and then email that out. I will have to try that later today.

Yes I did and but did not work. I do expect to get some air time with Product Management next month and we will remind them of the desirability of the ability to email a dashboard to a C-Suite executive persona.

One tricky thing I noticed which comes into play when you have a whole dashboard full of little key measure widgets (ie a gauge chart report which renders as a single colored number). Typically you put the widget and you use a text box before the widget to explain what the key measure is.I see you have to be very careful on New Dashboards because now that these widgets dynamically jump all over the place as you move them around it's very easy to accidentally separate the widget from the text box that explains what key measure of the Widget refers to. You could easily end up with a whole column of Key Measures which are misaligned with their labels. Also, the new widgets are arguably prettier, but are longer in height, so the lower ones are not visible without scrolling. There is certainly an argument to be made for giving Admins the ability to select which style of Dashboard they want to use.

I have my opinion at first glance. Without saying too much, I'm hoping Quickbase has a plan to solve the problems Quickbase Customers are pointing out.

Actually I did a little more playing around with new dashboard widgets and they are growing on me. I realize since the box is a little or a little deeper that I can now put my labels for what the Widget represents inside the box and free up a lot of space I used to use up a whole box for the Rich Text label.

Forced to use new dashboards?

MarkShnier__You
Qrew Legend
8 months ago
One tricky thing I noticed which comes into play when you have a whole dashboard full of little key measure widgets (ie a gauge chart report which renders as a single colored number). Typically you put the widget and you use a text box before the widget to explain what the key measure is.
I see you have to be very careful on New Dashboards because now that these widgets dynamically jump all over the place as you move them around it's very easy to accidentally separate the widget from the text box that explains what key measure of the Widget refers to. You could easily end up with a whole column of Key Measures which are misaligned with their labels. Also, the new widgets are arguably prettier, but are longer in height, so the lower ones are not visible without scrolling.
There is certainly an argument to be made for giving Admins the ability to select which style of Dashboard they want to use.
JimHarrison
Qrew Champion
8 months ago
I have my opinion at first glance. Without saying too much, I'm hoping Quickbase has a plan to solve the problems Quickbase Customers are pointing out.
MarkShnier__You
Qrew Legend
8 months ago
Actually I did a little more playing around with new dashboard widgets and they are growing on me. I realize since the box is a little or a little deeper that I can now put my labels for what the Widget represents inside the box and free up a lot of space I used to use up a whole box for the Rich Text label.
JimHarrison
Qrew Champion
8 months ago
Mike,
Take a look at the Discord channel if you haven't already. There is a conversation going on there regarding Tech Debt to these changes.

For example:
It seems that QuickBase customers are going to continuously incur the Tech Debt of updates to the system.
I don't see a paradigm shift in this update that would cause it to not be automatic. You still have columns. So, QuickBase could and should have scaled it appropriately based upon the column width of the existing Dashboards. The paradigm shift that I was expecting, especially given the fact that QuickBase expects us to upgrade our current dashboards, was doing away with columns all together and allowing the builder to size the widgets and place them in free form. In either case, QuickBase could have adjusted the size of the display by calculating the portion of the screen that widget resides in.
- MikeTamoush
  Qrew Commander
  8 months ago
  Jim,
  I haven't been to the discord much, and don't remember how to find it. I had an invite a while back, but it expired. How can I join the discord? Thx.
JessicaCurtis
Qrew Trainee
5 months ago
I cannot believe these dashboards cannot be printed. I spent tons of time creating them only to find out there is no native print function and Quickbase does not provide an ETA on making that available. Blows my mind they released these without that capability. Does anyone have a workaround?
- JimHarrison
  Qrew Champion
  5 months ago
  I believe we are using Forms and inserting reports onto the form. Forms have print functionality and layout is reasonably controlled. One of the team has been building forms for print and is quite happy with the results. Give it a try and tell us what you learn.
  - MarkShnier__You
    Qrew Legend
    5 months ago
    Just to echo what Jim said above. New forms and new style email notifications work pretty well together. So I also have a client where we set up a record in a table with a single record in it. We put the key measures on that form. And then we send an email Out each day. But in my situation with this client, there were not that many different key measures. So it's not like we had a dashboard full of KPI widgets.
    
    but thinking out loud I wonder if it's possible to embed an iframe of a dashboard onto a new form and then email that out. I will have to try that later today.

Forum Discussion

Forced to use new dashboards?