My Favorite Airtable
March 06, 2018
My Favorite Airtable
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
I have been using Airtable personally for a number of years. When I encountered a new process at my current job that needed a bigger fix than "an Excel spreadsheet", Airtable was my first thought. The first Airtable base I made for work was a collection of quotes that we could use for marketing materials. Now, we use multiple Airtable bases for tracking project progress, organizing our e-Learning courses and the data associated with them, keeping track of our collaborations data, and organizing our educational initiatives. Airtable is easy to use, has an excellent relational aspect that isn't easily done anywhere else and is nicely customizable to our needs.
- It's a relational database, but it's easy to use & understand
- Multiple Views means I don't have to constantly re-sort my data
- Being able to pull in data from other tables helps eliminate the duplication that we have on many excel sheets
- I'd love to see charts and graphs as a feature - right now we are exporting back to Excel to do that portion
- Being able to create custom permission levels - being able to edit only specific fields, or allowing a workspace user to access only a portion of the bases without having to invite them individually would be useful
- Being charged per workspace is fine, but often I want to subdivide the bases in our workspace and split them out by theme, or just add headings and sort them differently, which we can't do. If we were charged per user account and that extended to all workspaces, that could also allow us to split each department into their own workspace without tripling the cost.
- Rather than using a variety of spreadsheets that are rarely updated and have duplicate data, Airtable has allowed us to streamline those processes and reduce that duplication.
- Having a group of Airtable bases is much easier to find than a document in a file-sharing site that may have been moved or changed.
For us, the most important things to consider were the relational aspect (linking one record to another record) and the ease of use. We found Smartsheets clunky and unable to add relationships, and introducing relationships in Google Sheets or Excel was just too difficult to sustain beyond one or two spreadsheets in very specific circumstances. Airtable's layout and easy relational capabilities made it our top pick.