I'll try to paint a picture here, using time tracking as an example.Īll of my employees submit their hours through an Airtable form. It is really hard to understand without using it, but it's kind of like if you designed Excel to treat VLookup (or Index(Match)) as a core principle. Now we're getting nerdy! This is the most foreign feature if you’re new to Airtable. If you fill it out and submit, your entry will show up in the expense base above. While forms are perhaps the best extra view type, you can also create a calendar, a Gantt chart for project management, or a few other very useful view types with a click of a button. Magic! This is how all of my staff submits their hours and expenses. You can then share a URL for this form, and when a user completes it, the data automatically populates your table. Creating a form is as simple as clicking a button, which automatically creates a form from all of the fields in your table. Formsįorms in Airtable are a type of view. It will open a menu where you can choose another view, "Personal Expenses" that shows only expenses where the employee used their personal funds to make a purchase. You can experiment with the views in the expense tracking example above by clicking or hovering over "Main View" in the upper left part of the window. In Airtable, you can create and save any number of views and reference them by visiting the sidebar. In Excel, this kind of 'view' can be achieved by creating tables and using table filters, but you would need to filter out the T-shirts every time you want to look at them. Your views live on the left sidebar for easy access. All of the information on pants, hats, etc is still there in hiding, but you're able to focus on what matters in the moment. In Airtable, you would just create a view that filters out anything but T-shirts, perhaps grouped by size and sorted by price. Say you're a clothing store looking at your inventory, which has hats, pants, T-shirts and socks, but you often want to see just how many T-shirts you have. Airtable's view feature has a similar effect on spreadsheet data. Remember when Gmail brought search to email? We used to spend hours filing and deleting emails, and then one day google told us all it was actually ok to never delete an email again, because finding a needle in a haystack just became incredibly easy. Possibly more important, it's fun! Oh and did I mention the awesome colors? More on those later.Īn Airtable database is called a "base." Here's an example base where employees can record their work-related expenses: That keeps you organized and eliminates the possibility for many errors that we typically make in a spreadsheet. Once you've specified the field type, you can't put anything else in that field. It can be a number or text (with support for emojis □), but it can also be a checkbox, a drop-down selection, a date, or an attachment (yes, you can drop a PDF or any other file type into a cell). In Airtable, every column, or "field", has a type that you pick. Still confused? Let's talk about features. Still in Excel: Cash forecasting, financial models, and budgeting - anything that requires a more free-form analysis. But Airtable has replaced more than half of the functions that I used to rely on Excel for: employee time tracking, expense tracking, project management, inventory, and our customer database all live in Airtable - basically anything that needs quick, easy data capture and benefits from better organization. It depends! In running my small business, I still use Excel daily, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
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