Airtable — A new favorite tool

I’ve been getting more interested in Excel over the past few years, recently I came across Airtable. I’ve used it in the past, but it wasn’t until I upgraded to a pro account and was able to use some of the newer features that I got hooked.

Excel is a great application, but the UI can be clunky — one has to learn the VB script and formulas, lookup tables, etc. It’s powerful, don’t get me wrong — but my background is JavaScript development — the web!

Let me introduce you to Airtable, which is not a direct replacement for Excel — but really a combination of relational tables and excel.

Out of the box these are my favorite features:

• Templates — You can easily start with a base template (tons of examples) and gives you a good idea of how others are using the tool.
• About 10 different field types — short text, long text, list, formula, attachment, checkbox, link to another record, link to another table.
• It offers the ability to create different views — grid view (traditional excel), calendar view, Kanban view, Gantt view and form view (where you can collect data into your Airtable).
• Airtable apps — a marketplace of their own apps and community apps to extend Airtable. You can create pages from your records, Send emails, chart data, pivot table, search, import csv files, connect to JIRA cloud to name just a few.
• You can build your own apps using React and JavaScript — will have to give this one a go at some point.
• Automations — do something when something happens. I’m running a weekly email notification based on current status of my Airtable. It’s simple, but I’d like to explore more automations.
• Integrations — You can integrate with many different services, I haven’t really explored this too much yet — but will dig deeper into it.
• Airtable Sync — I’m using this on one of my Airtables that keeps one base in-sync with another. I love this feature.
• Pricing — It’s very straightforward, you only have to pay for editors and can have unlimited free viewers. You can easily share views of a base or allow a viewer to see the whole base. It’s very easy to scale up and down, easy to cancel if you need to. And I love their whole system of referral credits, it seems to work well.
• Universe — last but not least, another place for inspiration