Baffled by Airtable? Here are five things we figured out.
Psssst. Have you tried Airtable? We’d never heard of it and then suddenly, like a vial of CBD oil, we noticed everyone was using it. Airtable is a mashup of a spreadsheet and a relational database that also generates forms and spits out customized calendars, all while looking beautiful and performing intuitively. It combines the functionality of tools like Google Sheets, Asana, Trello, Pipedrive, Survey Monkey, and Calendly with the storage capacity of a database. If the rumours were true, this would be the omni tool we’d been dreaming of.
With blissful visions of workplace serenity in our minds, we signed up. Well, as anyone who isn’t a relational database expert quickly learns, Airtable is terribly powerful yet terribly overwhelming — it can connect everything, and it can do so in seemingly infinite ways. We realized that we had to be purposeful about how we set up our bases and categorized our information, otherwise we’d drown in our own data.
This is the first in a series of blogs describes how Loup — a design and innovation consultancy, a small start-up, and a distributed team — uses Airtable as an:
- image database
- social media manager
- task manager for distributed teams
- CRM/business development tracker
- candidate manager for hiring
- back-end event organizer
When we began, there were scant resources available beyond the helpful (but limited) templates and a community forum. We wandered in the dark for a while before we figured things out. We hope this series saves you some time and frustration.
Here are the five things we had to wrap our heads around:
1. No “One Base to Rule Them All”
Airtable bases contain all of your project information. Within each base, tables are used to further segment data. You can link data in different tables but you cannot link between multiple bases. This was a huge challenge for us early on. First, it meant that we could not have one canonical source for information we often linked to, such as staff names, client names, and project names. Second, because of privacy/permissions, it meant that we had to think carefully about what pieces of information needed to connect. One mega-base to do everything was unappealing, partly because we need to give contractors access to certain parts of our business, but not to everything (and Airtable’s permissions and billing are complicated and unhelpful for a small shop that employs freelancers with time-delimited interactions).
But, if information doesn’t link across bases, where is the dividing line? We decided to create two primary bases: one for communications and one for management. Initially we promised ourselves we’d only have two bases, believing that more would get confusing. Later we realized that small, stand-alone bases are super efficient to run individual events, as well as to manage hiring.
Our communications base (which we’ll cover in our next post) contains a table that is home to all of our images; branding assets like logos, fonts, color palettes (for Loup as well as for our clients — because we design assets that align with their branding), and boilerplate text descriptions of our organization and work. It’s easily accessible by Loup staff and contractors. A second table handles everything social: blogs, text, and images along with a calendar of when we posted about each topic across all social platforms. There’s some light task management built in so we can collaboratively create content as a team, with different people owning images, text, and posting.
Our management base handles client information, tracks business development opportunities, and takes care of our program, project, and task management.
In our experience, this has been a good dividing line; there is surprisingly little hopping back and forth between bases. A similar division others might find useful is one base for planning and another for production.
2. Where are my Russian dolls?
Airtable doesn’t support sub-tasks or checklists within fields, which is a significant hurdle for people wanting to replace Asana or Trello. We almost gave up on Airtable when we smacked head-on into this wall, since nested tasks are a big part of our project management. But by modifying some hacks from the community forum, we DIY’d our own solution using the grouping function, and can now organize our tasks into main tickets with sub-tasks. It requires some inside-out thinking that everyone on the team had to get comfortable with, but we learned that patience and creativity pay off. After a bit of iterating during our weekly heartbeat kickoffs, we closed out our Trello accounts and moved fully to Airtable for project management.
3. Look different ways
Coming from Google Sheets, we initially kept trying to work in grid view. Depending on the types of data in your base, this view can be a hot mess! Over time, we figured out that each different application of Airtable will make sense with a particular view. We use gallery view when working with images, kanban view for social, and grid view for project managing. It seems obvious now — these views were clearly designed for these specific purposes — but it was a leap for us to understand that (1) Airtable is more than a spreadsheet so it’s ok to ignore grid view, and (2) no matter what your view, learn to hide fields! Airtable will manage all your data but there’s no need to clutter your view with the connective tissue.
4. Data is networked, not linear
Airtable data is all about relationships. Conceptually, this is completely different from a spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets. When you link records in a base, it’s not a static connection, but rather a two-way relationship. This allows data to be used, viewed, linked, and arranged in seemingly endless ways.
To noobs, the catch-22 quickly becomes evident: a good base will allow your data to travel down many paths and create links that will fill your life with ease but before you can wield these mighty powers, you must gaze into the future and understand how future-you will need to use and view your data. In essence, you need to backwards-design your base. If that feels overwhelming, we hear you!
Our advice is to accept the fact that you’re going to spend some time making crappy data relationships that don’t work properly. Experiment with a limited number of variables to get the hang of it (the templates are great because you can play with fake data). Invest the time in monkeying around before you even think about importing your own data because grokking this relationship piece is truly the key to understanding the tool. (By the way, you can do all this playing around using a free account.)
5. It’s worth almost drowning
There’s a learning curve to Airtable. There’ll likely be some gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair at the start. It took us about six weeks — not an insignificant effort — but we’ve now jettisoned multiple paid accounts on other tools.
Our entire team has ownership and agency over the different ways we use the product, and we all mined the tool during our initial experimenting to uncover valuable tips and tricks. Airtable has made us more thoughtful about what data we need to succeed. (Our friends at Aspiration Technology have a great post on why this is important: Data: Your Most Important Tech Asset). Understanding the relationships between different pieces of our work has helped us streamline our processes.
So much gratitude is owed to our teammate, Christine Prefontaine, who persevered at the outset with a clear-headed vision of what future-us needed 🙇🏽♀️
Next Up: A deep dive into our communications base
In our next post, we’ll share the nitty-gritty details of how we manage our images and social media posts with our communications base. Have questions? Leave a comment below and we’ll do our best to answer.
Interested in bringing Airtable to your team?
Loup offers custom organizational design and guidance with a specialization in helping geographically distributed teams, communities, and network-building projects. We use tools like Airtable to establish healthy project management processes and practices for teams. Learn more about our services.
