Open record UI
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Patrick Barron
There is a feature request about having three columns, building on this; When in an open record in addition to things like three columns, significantly better customize the view by:
- Each field having its own "display field if" formula
- Being able to reposition the Field title (Top, Left, Place-holder, Empty)
- Ability to add blanks spaces or fields, which can be relocated like a field.
Currently using a database but for a beginner like myself it's MUCH, MUCH less intuitive and more difficult to modify. Too much so. Smartsuite is great, easier to use, learn, adjust and more fully integrated as a complete tool.
Jon Darbyshire
Thank you for posting, Patrick Barron! I have a few more questions for you:
- What specific challenges are you facing with the current database system that make it less intuitive?
- Can you provide examples of how you envision using the 'display field if' formula in your workflow?
- How would the ability to reposition field titles and add blank spaces improve your user experience?
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Patrick Barron
Jon Darbyshire
Thanks for the questions.
- We assisted people with their banking, budgeting and rent/bill paying.
We've been using Ninox since 2018. Although it's meant to be intuitive it seems everything quickly gets into fairly complex scripting (for a beginner). We originally hired our database to be built. Documentation and training is not as good as Smartsuites. I've watched, read and participated in online training 10 to 1 over Smartsuite and Smartsuite is far more intuitive and easy to use. I can do more in SmartSuite today than I have in our system in 6+ years. Nx does have the ability to be taken "offline" and hosted on your own server which was something that originally appealed to us, although we've never moved beyond the web based platform. It seems that many SAAS companies don't survive. As a start-up I wanted to avoid potential issues. It seems to be a system if you know what you're doing it can do almost anything. If you don't it's very challenging :)
In it there's nothing like the communication center Smartsuite has. There isn't the document designer aspect. Again, the system does these things but it's a steep learning curve. More than I've ever had time for. Nothing about it is intuitive (IMO). It seems the changes they've made the last two years or so are attempting to simplify and moving more towards what Smartsuite and Airtable do, some of the ui and having workspaces and such.
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Patrick Barron
- The "display field if" feature we use in several ways and is great! If we're tracking someone's budgeting and they're paid monthly, bi-weekly or weekly we may only want one "amount set aside" field to show for monthly, two for bi-weekly and four or five for weekly. If a person is paying only rent, or also arrears and/or bills we may want subsequent fields to show for each. If rent is paid by check, bank's bill-pay or the landlord's web portal we have subsequent fields for each. Things like this.
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Patrick Barron
- For us, primarily this is a visual/Ui appearance issue. It gives much more flexibility to opranzing the visual appearance of an open record. When using an open record and having the layout in a nice, organized fashion, if you then are using display-if fields, the subsequents fields can significantly alter the placement and order of the fields in open record making it very unorganized. Having the ability in Smartsuite to display a section or not is a huge improvement over AT's open record.
I imagine some of this could be addressed working through dashboards more but I have not explored this yet.
I hope this helps.