If it would only brew the coffee it would be perfect
March 19, 2018
If it would only brew the coffee it would be perfect
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
We operate a large sanctuary for unwanted, abandoned and abused former pet pigs. Keeping up with hundreds of unique animals, what habitat they reside in, medical histories, intake records, was a daily 2 hours of office time. Scheduling workers, keeping up with orchard care and land management, all have been established in Airtable. It provides me with quick access to everything I need to keep the business operating smoothly and the animals all getting oversight.
Pros
- Easy to create views for recurrent needs. Every time we take a pig to the vet I need to quickly prepare a card with all the pigs specs.. weight (current), origin (it matters which rescue it came from, some have environmental health concerns), current problem, vetting/vaccination and parasite control history. By keeping a vet card view in the residents table, its a 2 minute task to filter the output to the specific pig and print it. In Access, even with long hours spent developing queries and reports, it would take at least 30 mins.
- Available field types. Being able to structure what I want without it being a "back door" process every time I need a new table is an amazing thing. It has always been possible but it has never been easy before Airtable.
- Access anywhere, across different platforms. When we are a half mile from the house and the vet is looking at a sick animal, and needs to know when he was vaccinated last for pneumonia, I can find that in seconds on my phone. Before Airtable we spent a lot of non productive time going back to the office to look up records.
- Everybody with a "need-to-know" has the same info. The links give the caregiver the info of who should be in each habitat and the vet knows who is on medication and why when he goes into his clinic to treat a sick patient.
- Its intuitive, its easy.. it saves me a minimum of 1-2 hours a day. Thats a real gift to someone working 16 hrs a day every day of the year!
Cons
- I miss the ability to use the tab to advance across the width of the table.
- I would like to be able to format pages of text and photos into an editable publishing doc. (I use MS Pub and/or Word). I could then extract in near print ready format, pages for my newsletters. As we develop our library, it would eliminate a step or two.
- I find it a bit too quick to accept a deleted record. An "are you sure you want to delete this record?" might be good.
- When selecting records to use, it is very easy to lose what is already selected as your scroll down or across.. starting back at "Allen" when you had reached "Tinkerbell" is annoying.
- The average worker in industry spends about 2000 hours on the job. Airtable has saved me about 700 hours of wasted time with lesser tools. That's a third of anyone's year.. No small gift! And if these were paid professional hours (we are an all volunteer organization), it would equate to about $35000 a year.
- In addition to doing things easier and faster, we are starting our long requested Library of published articles. This will eventually be in a formal book form. Attempts to even THINK about the steps before Airtable were futile.
- As the printing capabilities keep becoming better and better, reaching our donors with the info they want to see will result in an increase in support.
Comments
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