Excellent non-tech solution to spreadsheet hell!
March 23, 2018
Excellent non-tech solution to spreadsheet hell!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
We are using it across the whole organization now, starting out with HR for applicant tracking, employee management etc, and now rolling out for program management, tracking PR activities, monitoring technology resources, hardware setups etc.
We were earlier using Google Sheets to track, but as a significant proportion of the organization is not very technically inclined, writing formulae and scripts to create applications was a challenge. Airtable makes it super easy to create links between different tables, and the Slack integration and attachments features are things we wished were there in Google Sheets for a long time, and had to resort to clunky alternatives like uploading content to dropbox and then copy pasting links.
We were earlier using Google Sheets to track, but as a significant proportion of the organization is not very technically inclined, writing formulae and scripts to create applications was a challenge. Airtable makes it super easy to create links between different tables, and the Slack integration and attachments features are things we wished were there in Google Sheets for a long time, and had to resort to clunky alternatives like uploading content to dropbox and then copy pasting links.
- Very easy to use and friendly interface. Ability to create links between tables without using VLOOKUP or other formulae
- Attachments! So so important for us, as we need to track things like delivery receipts, employee documents, etc. Now they can all live in one place instead of Google drive folders that need to manually be tracked in Google Sheets/excel
- Grouped grid views is a godsend - gives the ability to quickly add entries group wise. In a traditional spreadsheet, we had to insert rows in between (that would sometimes break formulae/row no.s)
- Ability to set detailed and customizable table-wise and group wise permissions. E.g. we have an employee table, and I want all our employees to see just name and designation, but not others.
- Global variables - Having the ability to reference global constants / assumptions would make it much more useful for financial planning / budgeting applications. E.g. referring to currency conversion rates etc
- Support for (some) blocks in free / plus plans like Pivot Tables etc.
- Time saved in developing our in house employee management tool is massive! Was able to create a full-fledged HR system in 1 hour, v.s. at least 4-5 hours using Google Sheets or creating a custom web-based solution
- We have also implemented it for managing our in-house PR process for managing journalist relations and task management for PR activities. This is in the process and we are yet to do a formal ROI analysis here
- Project Management - We earlier were using a clunky and difficult to use software to manage our projects, but Airtable seems to be a great option for improving productivity and ease of use by at least 30-40%
There are 2 main competitors I feel, Google Sheets and MS Excel. Both are great for creating complex spreadsheets with complex logic and interlinking in between them, however, the speed of quickly creating process flows, data management systems and more in Airtable is way better.
Given the fact that we also have a large proportion of our team that is not very tech-savvy, we've faced difficulty in getting people to use formulae like VLOOKUP or conditional statements etc in traditional spreadsheet applications, and now with Airtable they can create their own process and logic flows without writing any code.
Given the fact that we also have a large proportion of our team that is not very tech-savvy, we've faced difficulty in getting people to use formulae like VLOOKUP or conditional statements etc in traditional spreadsheet applications, and now with Airtable they can create their own process and logic flows without writing any code.