Easy to learn to onboard your entire team - yet powerful
May 01, 2018
Easy to learn to onboard your entire team - yet powerful
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
We're using Airtable for knowledge, process, and records management as our research center grows to include more proposals, projects, people, publications, and presentations. A relational database management system allows us to keep track of the relationships between each of these with up-to-date records. University and funding agency guidelines expect us to retain records for reporting and we had been doing this in Google Drive, particularly Google Sheets. As we scaled up, records in Google Sheets became less manageable as new records were added that weren't properly linked. Airtable allows us to structure fields and relationships but is as easy to use or easier to use than Google Sheets.
- Great user experience and minimal learning curve. It wasn't until I became aware of Airtable that we found a solution that allows us to implement the best features of a collaborative RDBMS with our staff who don't have any training. I had previously used Zoho Creator and found that it was difficult to onboard new users because of a steeper learning curve.
- Easy to share views and invite contributions via forms.
- Blocks add significant functionality that would be hard to custom build.
- I'd really like to be able to link records or a view between bases within my workspace.
- The form designer is not as featured as we're used to with Google Forms.
- I'm using the Airtable Importer by Railsware to bring Airtable data into Google Sheets. Import from Google sheets would be a great feature.
- Airtable allows us to significantly reduce staff time required to run a research proposal review process, which has a high positive ROI.
- With Airtable, we're doing a better job at tracking which research faculty works with each other so we have an idea of collaboration opportunities.
- Airtable will improve our organization's knowledge retention.
- Airtable will help us improve the service we offer research faculty by better tracking them as individuals.
It wasn't until I became aware of Airtable that we found a solution that allows us to implement the best features of a collaborative RDBMS with our staff who don't have any training. I had previously used Zoho Creator and found that it was difficult to onboard new users because of a steeper learning curve.