What is Airtable, Why Use It, and How Does It Work?

What if you could enjoy the simplicity of spreadsheets and the lightning-quick connectivity of a digital database simultaneously? That's a game-changer for any business, allowing basic spreadsheets to become dynamic, cutting-edge platforms for streamlining workflows like never before. This is precisely what Airtable offers with its intuitive interface. But What is Airtable?

This Cloud-based platform helps you create custom tables, views, and automation for projects ranging from content calendars to inventory tracking. This blog thoroughly explores What is Airtable, spotlighting its importance, applications, features and more. So read on and learn why it's the ideal choice to handle your business workflows with ease!

Table of Contents

1) What is Airtable?

2) Why is Airtable so Important?

3) Airtable Applications 

4) Airtable Features

5) How to use Airtable?

6) Airtable Pricing

7) Conclusion

What is Airtable?

Airtable is a popular Cloud-based platform and database service. Equipped with a highly intuitive interface, Airtable combines spreadsheet, database, and collaboration software features and can be used for tasks such as:

1) Project Management 

2) Contact databases

3) Task lists

4) Document Management

Airtable allows users to store and organize data in the more familiar spreadsheet format through features such as relational databases, collaboration tools, and custom views. The best thing is that Airtable doesn't require you to have skills such as SQL scripting.

Why is Airtable so Important?

With Airtable, teams can create powerful apps to drive their workflows, while all are working from the same data sources and updating in real time. The following reasons exemplify why Airtable is so important for organizations:

1) Driving Faster Business Results

Airtable enables teams to build powerful, flexible apps on top of shared data to drive their unique workflows. Gathering customer feedback, planning product launches, and tracking sales—all essential workflows are interoperable but customized to each team’s specific needs.

2) Making teams More Effective

Using Airtable means less time spent hunting for information from someone on another part of the company. This allows for more time to be spent on high-value tasks that have a bigger impact on your business.

3) Circumventing Business Risks

Airtable helps organizations mitigate business risks in the following ways:

1) With accurate, up-to-date data, your teams can have the most current information, helping avoid costly business-critical mistakes.

2) For a lot of organizations, silos lead to higher risks of errors or delayed decision-making. Airtable eliminates these silos by providing real-time shared data, reducing manual mistakes, and improving visibility.

3) Organizations can now manage apps at scale on a single platform equipped with enterprise-grade security and controls to manage users, groups, and permissions.

Airtable Applications 

To give you a crystal-clear idea of Airtable's versatility, here are some examples of what you can achieve for your organization with this tool:

1) Manage a CRM 

With Airtable's ability to link related records, you can monitor and share notes about interactions with customers, partners, and anyone else you work with across an organization. Even better, Airtable is not limited to businesses; you can also use it as a personal CRM.

2) Track Projects

As one of the best Project Management apps today, Airtable offers significant customization. This makes it ideal for project collaboration since each team member can tailor the database to meet their needs. For instance, a Project Manager will be able to create a timeline view to get a top-level overview of a product launch, while a designer can swiftly sort their tasks by due date.

3) Plan Content

For marketing teams, Airtable is a great option for mapping out your content schedule. It helps streamline content scheduling and organize deadlines, making it an essential tool for visualizing calendars, tracking progress, and simplifying planning and approval processes.

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Airtable Features

Airtable delivers a unique blend of spreadsheet and database functionalities. From customizable templates and record linking to integrations and automation, Airtable brings plenty of features to the table. Let’s explore them in detail:

1) Customizable Templates and Forms

Setting up the first Airtable database can be complex. However, this platform does offer a broad range of templates pre-built to help you get started quickly, from personal planners to business themes such as Project Management, product planning, content calendar, and more. Additionally, Airtable forms can be used to gather data and embedded on websites or shared via a link.

2) Collaboration Features

Airtable provides a range of collaboration capabilities that enable users to assign tasks, tag and comment, share project statuses, and record activity history. Additionally, it makes it easier for teams to find and share relevant data, assign permissions to collaborators, and outline various roles and levels of access.

Record Linking

One of Airtable’s standout features as a relational database is ensuring connections between data across tables. This allows users to connect related data across multiple tables, reducing redundancy and ensuring data remains accurate across the database. It also unlocks powerful functionality, like referencing data from linked tables and creating lookups.

Integrations and Automation

Airtable provides native integrations with numerous apps like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Slack. This extends further with automation, enabling the following:

1) Setting triggers based on specific inputs or changes

2) Automatic actions such as updating records, sending notifications, or initiating workflows in other integrated platforms.

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Airtable API and Scripting

For Developers, the platform delivers a well-documented Application Programming Interface (API) that extends functionality along with a scripting block that runs JavaScript directly inside Airtable.

1) User Access Controls

Users are in control of who can see, comment, or edit a given table or database. This includes options for comment-only access, read-only access, and full editing rights.

2) Flexible Views

Airtable enables you to view your data in numerous ways including: 

1) Grid view

2) Calendar

3) Gallery

4) Kanban 

5) Custom form view 

Such flexibility helps tailor the data presentation to particular use cases based on data and the people working with the data.

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How to Use Airtable?

There are five basic building blocks to an Airtable database namely bases, tables, fields, records and views. Let's explore these components in detail to understand how to unlock Airtable’s full potential:

1) Bases

A base (short for database) stores everything you need for your project. The base might be called something like "New House Hunting" or "Employee Directory". Even though you could start with a blank base and build it from scratch, starting with a template is the ideal way to get familiar with what's possible.

Airtable provides a strong library of templates pre-filled with relevant sample data which you can modify based on your own. For instance, there are templates for event planning, employee directory, and even job hunting.

2) Tables

Tables, which make up bases, contain a list of data regarding one item. Similar to the worksheets in a spreadsheet, every base can have one or more tables. For instance, an employee directory database can have three tables: 

1) Employee directory 

2) Departments

3) Location

3) Fields

Think of fields like the spreadsheet columns, the difference being fields are specifically designed to ensure consistency in your data. Every field has a name and can be customized to contain a broad variety of content, including: 

1) Photos

2) Attachments

3) Text

4) Dates

5) Status updates

6) Checkboxes

4) Records

A record refers to an item in a table and its relevant details. They are the database equivalent of spreadsheet cells and rows. For example, in a table of employees, each record could be a different employee, and the employee's relevant data, including the department, name, and address, can be detailed in fields.

5) Views

Although viewing all your records at once can be useful, you can opt for multiple views for each table in a base. Consider a view in Airtable like a unique perspective on the same underlying table data. These customized views can come in handy when you only want to display records that match certain criteria—like all employees in the Engineering department. You can even set up a calendar view to quickly see employees’ birthdays at a glance.

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Airtable Pricing

The following table summarizes the Airtable pricing range for free, team, business and enterprise scale plan:

Conclusion

In conclusion, Airtable merges the simplicity of spreadsheets with powerful database capabilities, simplifying the process of organizing, collaborating, and streamlining workflows. It suits every possible workflow with customizable views, automation, and effortless collaboration. Understanding What is Airtable opens up the potential for smarter, smoother, and more creative projects across diverse industries.

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