TeamDesk Blog

Area Code to Time Zone mapping

Our US customers, especially the ones using Leads management or Calls tracking applications, kept asking us about adding a functionality that automatically fills in the time zone according to the area code for the US phone numbers as it would save them a great deal of time by instantly displaying timezones next to the phone numbers.

We created a sample Area Code to TimeZone mapping application to demonstrate this functionality. Please explore the application and review a Setup mode.
The application is based on two tables joined via many-to-many relationship.
"Phones" table contains sample phone number list along with the State/Time Zone offset extracted from the "Mappings" table.
Area code is intelligently extracted from the US phone number regardless of the format.
"Mappings" table contains mapping between the US phone number area code and the timezone.
Now you may add area code to time zone mapping functionality to your existing applications or hire us to do it for you.

How to Calculate Running Balance

Given lines with amount (positive for income, negative for expenses) in a table called Money, you want to calculate running balance. What should you do?

First you have to define order for lines. Standard Date Create column TeamDesk generates for every table can suit your needs - old lines will appear on top, recent on bottom. If you plan to reorder the lines, you may need to create another, editable Timestamp column, let's call it Date.

Next, let's create many-to-many relation from Money table to self, and specify "Date Created < Date Created" match condition (or Date < Date, if you decided for custom timestamp). For any given record this relation will create the list of preceding records. Calculating a total on the amount column will result to opening balance. Adding the total (via formula column) will result to closing balance.

Simple, is not it?

Running Balance application from Application Library does one step beyond separating operation from amount and calculating income and expenses. Feel free to explore.

Workflow Rules

...are finally available.

For those who are not familiar with the concept here is an brief overview.

TeamDesk Workflow Rule filters the records to apply rule to, and allows to trigger an action(s) when the record is added, updated or deleted; on, before or after the date specified in the record's field; or on periodical basis.

Actions to execute are: send e-mail, set other field's values in current record, create a record in another table.

Images, Hyperlinks in Documents

While the idea to display images from attachment columns in the generated documents appeared long ago. However after few unsuccessful attempts to instruct Word display the picture the implementation was postponed.

We do care about our users, and users care about us. We'd like to thank Anjuim Moied for pointing us the way to insert picture via {INCLUDEPICTURE} Word field, and now it is fully integrated with TeamDesk.

Placeholders for the attachment columns marked as "Display Images" are now substituted with an image from database. The same applies for URL/Formula columns marked as "Display as Image".

Other URLs and E-Mail address fields are now properly formatted and hyperlinked.