What is Airtable?
What do you like best about Airtable?
It’s fairly intuitive and easy to find tutorials and help for things that aren’t clear in the software.
I like the various ways I can sort and see information and it makes tracking information clear across multiple dashboards.
I really like that I can lock down what people have access to or not by linking databases– for example, we let our coordinators see and help populate our rolodex of clients and collaborators, but that rolodex base feeds our CRM and staffing databases that they do not have access to, so we can keep financial data only accessible to owners and accounting.
I love that I can set up forms to fill out and that they’re relatively easy to populate on mobile!
The sheer amount of data that you can compile, track, and analyze in Airtable is astounding. It has transformed just about every area of our business, from project management to production analysis to employee record-keeping and onboarding and so much more. With integrations from Zapier and Make, your source data is essentially unlimited. We would be piloting a ship sans a rudder without Airtable.
What do you dislike about Airtable?
Some of the extensions are difficult to use and require some advanced knowledge. To my knowledge, it is not possible to overlay multiple sets of data on the built-in chart extension, and requires Vega-Lite to do that. I have neither the time nor desire to learn that, which is a bummer for something that is easily achievable on other platforms such as Google Sheets.
Airtable doesn’t handle printing well. Most of the time, it’s not a big deal, but there are times that it’s been very frustrating. And some elements of their subscription model are frustrating – two people who each have a Pro level account and have their own “workspace” cannot collaborate without one or the other paying for an additional user license.
I had a really hard time figuring out some of the formulas to get my data to show up correctly, and sometimes auto save prevents me from tracking my changes the way I want. I wish the help section was a little more user-friendly.
Sometimes setting up the connections between the different tables takes a lot of time for me to figure out how I want them together. I also wish I could more easily populate pieces of information from one record into a general note on another record. For example, as a teacher, various activities have some instruction and information. As I add the activity to a day’s list, I wish the instructions would populate into the large note so I can edit them as needed without changing the original instructions attached to the activity.
What problems is Airtable solving and how is that benefiting you?
Being able to easily keep track of how the activities are meeting curriculum outcomes is really great. I can easily see if I am missing teaching different skills or concepts and course correct as I’m planning. I really appreciate being able to organize and plan all that and then print a weekly planbook page to use as I’m teaching my lesson to the students.
I can monitor individual and corporate donations and collect data that is very important to our organization’s ability to build and maintain personal relationships with our donors. I can easily save the info that is pertinent to me and remove the data we don’t use.
I use my entire travel agency “back office” on Airtable. I use it to record sales for myself and my entire team, keep track of commissions from nearly 100 different suppliers, and track commission payments to sales agents.
Airtable allows us to access vast amounts of company data, from a birds-eye view to granular, which helps inform our decision-making process in all departments across our company.
Airtable Features
Pros
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“This software is so great for collaborating with non-google users. The features are smart and help do some of the work for us.”
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“Airtable is a godsend for collaboration between our Sales and Marketing teams and for easy visibility (enterprise-wide) into the various plans, calendars, and so on for those teams.”
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“I love it, and it was a big accomplishment for me to be able to organize all of the employees’ activities. The desire to reduce workflow to a more user-friendly level must be reined in.”
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“Airtable is brilliant for all project management needs it’s useful because you can create basis for all of your work and then follow things through to completion.”
Cons
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“The UI is still slightly complicated, and I had a lot of trouble finding documentation on linked fields.”
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“It’s usability is inhibited by the lack of design features. There is no way to upload your own icon for the bases.”
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“Horrid frustrating disapointed in most everything.”
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“The only problem I have with this software is the terrible iOS applications. If I want to use it on my iPad I do no use the app but rather the web browser due to the lack of functionality.”
Airtable Pricing
$0
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Yes, has free trial
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Yes, has free version