Airtable: More Powerful Than It Looks
March 22, 2018
Airtable: More Powerful Than It Looks
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
We use Airtable to solve, automate, and simplify a number of workflows in our Investment Office. Airtable also serves as a lightweight and extremely flexible repository for our ongoing work and opportunities. Primarily our Investment team uses it to manage deals and status, but our operations teams use it as well to keep the organization functioning and help with faster approvals. Our events team also uses Airtable to plan and execute different events we hold.
- Airtable is great for creating a simple and flexible CRM that has easy data inputs and great automated features (such as filtering and grouping).
- Airtable Blocks (new) allows us to create dashboards and high-level analysis that we use to monitor our work (especially great for executives).
- Airtable connects with Zapier allowing us to create automated workflows, especially great with email, to do things such as travel request approvals.
- Airtable is a great event management tool, even for large groups, because it stores information in a more mutable way than a regular spreadsheet or document.
- Airtable has a survey view that allows us to quickly collect data from people for any purpose. It also imports data (CSV, XLS, copy and paste) with great accuracy and ease.
- Airtable could be better at allowing record updating via surveys to allow people to complete incomplete record data. While it can be done using integrations with other services, the process is cumbersome.
- Airtable could help with data entry by building some scraping tools or "quick add" features.
- We have tracked hundreds of thousands of dollars of travel requests, using simple logic to help ensure compliance and Blocks to easily monitor spend.
- We have tracked billions of dollars in investment opportunities with Airtable, helping us screen and then process investments through completion.
- Microsoft Excel, Smartsheets, Salesforce, RelateIQ and Google Sheets
We spent significant time evaluating a number of CRM / Spreadsheet equivalents. Airtable beats them all in its flexibility and ease of use with many different inputs (often not or poorly handled by others). It also automates so many of the "common" use cases to the point where after data is in the software there's not that much work to get meaningful insight and usage out of it. This means more people can use it aside from well-versed folks, and it's easy to come up with a ton of use cases that might have been too cumbersome or impossible to make with other pieces of software.