Item: Airtable
Rating: 8
Author: Ora Goldman

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are just starting to use Airtable, but already it seems like it's going to add a lot of value over our current solution (Google Sheets). It will be used by a very small team of coordinators, who manage a lot of the operations and metrics.

For us, Airtable is going to be really useful in tracking contacts and attributes about contacts, and maintaining the connections between various tables in a more rigorous way than Google Sheets. Our data is currently rather dirty and not well-connected because of the lack of enforcing joins between tables (in Google Sheets), so Airtable will allow us to have the full functionality of a database with the ease of use of a spreadsheet, which is perfect for us!

Pros and Cons

Having the capabilities of a database with the ease of use of a spreadsheet is really great for us. Particularly, the ability to join tables, require matches between primary / foreign keys, and executing queries are all important.
The blocks are also a nice touch, where we can add graphs and summary numbers for quick access.
Finally, the table views have been incredibly important to us so far.

First, it appears that some of the querying functionality could be extended. Specifically, there have been some things I've wanted to do (such as creating various calculations or tables on the fly, and storing values from those calculations in other sheets) that I haven't been able to find the solution to.
Second, and this might already exist, but an introductory walk-through to all the column types (especially the not-so-obvious ones) would be great. For instance, it took me a little while to identify that some functionality I needed was identified by the "rollup" field type.
Third, I think that work can still be done on efficiently guiding the user through to specifically what they need, without having too many things displayed at once and overwhelming them. For instance, on various pages (like the Airtable Universe page), there are a lot of choices and it can feel rather overwhelming. I would love to see everything at a bit of a higher level, and then zoom into whatever I need.

Return on Investment

We haven't been using it very long, but already it's going to save us about three hours a week on metrics calculations and database upkeep. In addition, it's going to help us clean our data and make it more usable, which will take less time and also help us have a higher impact.

Alternatives Considered

Google Forms

We chose Airtable because of the database-like functionality it had while still maintaining the ease of use of a spreadsheet.

Other Software Used

Google Drive

Likelihood to Recommend

We haven't been using it very long, but so far it seems like Airtable is great for smaller teams with more standard needs, but it might not be a good solution as teams grow and have more complex and custom needs, in which case they might want to move to a custom database and app solution.

However, in our case it's very good for handling contacts, attendance at events, and other things that we need to do related to contacts. But again, we haven't been using it very long, so it's hard to know specifically where it excels or needs improvement.

Airtable for our organizer database

Overall Satisfaction with Airtable