Airtable makes your administrative overhead lighter!
August 10, 2019
Airtable makes your administrative overhead lighter!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Airtable
We use Airtable as a way to collaborate on specific projects across departments. It helps everyone on a cross-functional team have concurrent visibility into the project, add notes and tags, and track the progress of the various project pieces. We only use it in relation to projects for a specific product. It is not used across the whole organization.
- Users across the project can collaborate in real-time, without having to wait for someone to close the document, and without worrying about edits contradicting each other.
- Airtable allows for easy implementation of functionality like column types, without the complicated and time-consuming functions of Excel required to accomplish the same things.
- Creating a base and inviting your collaborators is quick and easy. Users can be granted different privileges.
- The tool is flexible enough to manage many different types of projects, everything from simple action item tracking and tagging to complex details and dates associated with client implementations.
- It is frustrating that collaborators cannot view different filters of a base concurrently. This has caused confusion during meetings, i.e. "Who removed my filters?"
- I wish that adding color to the records was not a paid feature. That seems like very basic functionality compared to all the other functionality included in the free version.
- It would be nice to have the option to auto-fit the row heights to the text, instead of a fixed row height across the base. That way we could see all the text in each record without having to double-click on some longer ones even in the "Extra Tall" view.
- We are using the free version, so in that regard, the ROI has been great. Airtable has helped us streamline complex project tracking.
- We are getting work done faster because we can spend less time setting up our tracking tools and more time actually doing the project work.
- We have less confusion from the less tech-savvy team members, since this tool is more user-friendly and intuitive than something like Excel.
The most similar tool we have used for this purpose is Microsoft Excel, and Airtable is so much easier to use than Excel. Instead of figuring out how to write a formula, create a custom list, or any other process that would allow Excel to do things like tag rows or link to other records, in Airtable we simply choose an option from a list, and that task is already done. We can also easily collaborate on bases without having to create a shared Excel document on a network drive, which is notoriously tricky. Airtable allows us to get to work on our projects without a lot of administrative overhead.