August 26, 2008

TrackVia Database: Powerful, Fast and Easy To Use (Much Improved)

Over the past few weeks I've been using a variety of online databases - QuickBase, DabbleDb and Trackvia. I wrote about databases and Excel in a previous post, Excel: The Pine-Sol Of Technology.

I used Trackvia several months ago and was quite under impressed with its interface and feature set. Last week I took it for a spin again, and am quite, quite impressed with how much it has been improved in all areas. In fact it's one of the best online databases I've used so far.

What you'll instantly like is the simple way (reminds you of Google a bit) that Trackvia is presented. The first two steps, however, could be simpler. First you create a project and then you create a database. This process could be simplified. But once you pass this step the true awesome simplicity of Trackvia shines.

You can upload an existing Excel spreadsheet or create one from scratch. When you're done, you can begin adding data to this database, easily share it with others (more on this later) or access and share the data in other ways.

Trackvia's features include:

• Finding duplicate data.
• Print Labels
• Mail Merge
• Email
• Fax

If you try to do these functions in any other database, it's not easy to do, especially with an online database, right out of the box. Often times it takes the skills of a programmer or integration with a 3rd party application. The power of Trackvia really shines in these four applications.

Having duplicate date wastes money (especially when mailing things to customers) and annoys customers who receive 5 copies of your nice postcard.

Printing labels is NOT rocket science (to many of us at least) but to others it can be challenging. Even if it's easy for you to do in Word or Word Perfect, being able to perform mail merge, right within your online database is a time saver.

Email and Faxing. Sure you can use Constant Contact or Vertical Response for email but having the OPTION of emailing your database from within one interface makes this so much easier and saves you time!

You can tell I like Trackvia a lot. Well, you'll like it a lot as well if you try it out.

tags: database , trackvia | 0 comments