We know that a lot of our users are not corporate IT guys, but still loves to use Ragic Builder to develop useful applications for the public. Because the public nature of these applications, we see a lot of people that are simply users of the application, not having a clear idea what Ragic Builder is, or not having an idea what he can do with it. He may be using a concert ticket exchange application. As he tries to make a new entry on the database, he will see the prompt that because he doesn’t have a Ragic Builder account, we won’t be able to recognize him the next time, so he won’t be able to edit his entry then. Therefore a lot of the application users are forced to register a Ragic Builder account, even though he may not be interested in building an application.

This seemed unnecessary, we’ve all already registered too many accounts on the Internet. All Ragic Builder need is to make sure you’re the one who created the entry. So…ta da! We now allow you to log in to Ragic using your Facebook account. In this way, application users will no longer need to register a Ragic Builder account just to modify their data.

Of course, you will need a Facebook account to do this. Also, if you logged in using your Facebook account, you cannot use Ragic Builder to build applications. If you would like to build applications on Ragic Builder, you still have to register for a Ragic Builder account!

Our experiences in the IT department told us, the hard work of making a bunch of data entry and data browsing function is invisible to company executives. (What? Aren’t they just simple data entry forms?) What really catch their attention are graphical charts and analytical reports.

Actually, this type of reaction is perfectly normal. An important part of the value of an enterprise system lies in the ability to aggregate all the data that everyone entered, making all kinds of analysis, to generate clear and understandable charts and reports, so that decision making executives can easily digest all the key data and trends to make a more informed decision. All the database design and entry forms are the silent but necessary infrastructures to make this possible.

What Ragic Builder is hard working on, is to use a simple spreadsheet interface, to turn all the painstaking work of making rigid database infrastructures, into a lighter, faster, easier, but just as powerful way. But after we enter so much data, we’ve always felt that we’re missing the ability to see the whole picture of our data. And today, we’ve finally got our missing piece of the puzzle.

For every database on Ragic Builder, we automatically generate a dashboard for it. It will generate a chart and a ranking table for each sheet in the database.

The chart is a stacked bar chart based on cross analysis of user selected fields on the data on the sheet. For example we can visually see how many open cases in our support system, and how many of the open cases are urgent. We can even click on a region of our chart, to see which cases are open and urgent.

The ranking table is based on a user specified field to do ranking. Similarly, all categories and numbers can be drilled down for more detail. If you need further analysis, you can click on the “Pivot Table” link, and you can do a full pivot table analysis on your data, based on the two dimensions that you picked.

Of course, all these functions are just a beginning. We know there are so much more ways that our users would like to analyze their business data. More and more features will be added to our dashboard according to everyone’s needs. A goal is to keep most these functions free from custom coding, if we can generate it automatically, let it be automatic. We’ve all spent too much time of our lives writing custom reports after another.

A big reason that everybody loves spreadsheets, is that you can manipulate many cells at once. Let’s say you entered an item for your online store, you got its name, price, spec, and all kinds of info. When you are entering the next item, you found that almost all fields are identical except for one. On a normal application or web form, there’s no choice but to enter it again, or maybe you can make it slightly quicker by selecting, copying, pasting each field on the screen.

But on spreadsheet it’s different. You can drag and select all the cells that you would like to copy, ctrl-c to copy, and paste the whole thing to the next row in one click. It’s things like this that makes a lot of business user reluctant to leave spreadsheets to using database applications. We would like to change this, we would like to duplicated this type of great functionality to our database applications. This time, we added multiple cell copy paste to Ragic Builder.

Just drag and select a region of fields that you would like to copy, and you will see the background of the cells selected becomes red. Click ctrl-c for copy, and you’ve just copy the content of all the fields that you selected. You can paste them to a text editor, or back to Ragic Builder. We will automatically put each value that you copied to each field at the location you chose, just like spreadsheet.

Come try it! We believe a better user interface is one of the key to better adoption of enterprise software. That’s the key to getting the value out of your investment!