One of the most challenging things for a startup founder to do is to try to keep their organizations organized. Considering how there are more ways to ruin a business than build it, poor organization often helps destroy a venture faster than the lack of funding and manpower. This is why it’s integral for business leaders to know precisely how to delegate tasks and communicate with their members. This is because when communication isn’t nurtured, and one’s tasks and assignments are all over the place, failure shouldn’t be too far off.
Fortunately, Airtable helps us prevent that. In a nutshell, Airtable does a swell job in shaping how organization should be in businesses.
Getting to know Airtable
At its core, Airtable is software that’s made to build databases and spreadsheets where all sorts of data can be saved, retrieved, and referenced. What’s more, anyone can create countless columns and rows where users can assign each element with a role, allowing certain fields to save certain data specifics effectively. This software is also perfect for creating visual galleries, kanbans, and calendars.
Because of all that, Airtable empowers all sorts of businesses and teams to organize basically anything and everything that involves storing certain information. Perhaps what makes it such a standout in today’s business climate is that it creates functionally stunning databases while providing useful and dynamic customization capacities without being too complex or difficult to navigate.
There’s little to no reason for anyone not to use Airtable. You can be a student leading a project or a mom planning a thanksgiving dinner, it really doesn’t matter—Airtable is effective. While Excel spreadsheets aren’t particularly bad, they’re not specifically engaging or the easiest to get around either.
Understanding Airtable
At first glance, Airtable may seem challenging to master considering its several features. But once you’ve familiarised which elements achieve what, being able to create Airtable tables easily becomes inspiriting and encouraging. Let’s go over important components you’re bound to learn when using the software.
Bases
Every detail that comprises a project or a task is stored in a base. Bases can be created from a spreadsheet, an existing base, or by an Airtable template.
Fields
The most elaborate element, Airtable fields are entries in a table. At present, there are about 16 types of Airtable fields, as enumerated below.
- Long text articles
- Email Addresses
- Single-line texts
- Smartphone and landline numbers
- Percentages
- Currencies
- File attachments
- Drop-downs
- Barcodes
- Auto-numbers
- Formulae
- Date and time
- URLs
- Single and multiple drop-down selections
- Checkboxes
- File Attachments
Views
As the name suggests, Views allows you to look at your data and tasks in specific ways. For instance, you may create a view that doesn’t show every single field, making you check only your tasks and not others’. In other words, views lets you customize what you see on your end to make things easier for you.
Team
An Airtable team refers to a cluster of bases, and collaborators can work on all of them at the same time and separately.
Records
Records refer to table rows.
Overall, what makes Airtable such a breather in the world of office culture and corporate red tapes are that the databases and spreadsheets you create through their platform can be as simple or elaborate as you want them to be. Simply put, Airtable functions the way you want them to when it comes to organization and keeping track of people’s duties.
Other reasons to start using Airtable
Another one of Airtable’s most promising aspects is its API. Luckily, for plenty of account managers and business heads, Airtable can be automatically integrated with Zapier, ensuring countless more possibilities when it comes to automation.
Here are a few more tidbits you should know about the software:
As mentioned earlier, Airtable has instinctive templates, making a first-time user’s experience much easier. Being able to directly access pre-built templates allows one to explore what Airtable can do, and which components lead to what. Here are the main driving qualities that should invite you to try Airtable ASAP:
Customization
Mentioning it once doesn’t cut it. While we’ve already talked about how Airtable can customize your bases and teams altogether, no spreadsheet tool comes close to its ability to do that. Airtable is a powerful organization tool that enables its users to accomplish many things the way they program it to.
Smartphone compatibility
No one likes opening spreadsheets on their phones. But when you utilize Airtable, accessing your data and working on your projects becomes doable, if not desirable. There’s a free plan, too, so there isn’t an excuse for you not to use it.
Amazing UI
Because it isn’t like any other, lots of people tend to seem overwhelmed and speechless when they’re first thrusted into the universe of Airtable. However, once you get the hang of it, everything else becomes self-explanatory. You can share your bases with as many people as you’d like and even have them change the functionalities as they’d wish.
Conclusion
To end, anyone and everyone who handles a group of professionals and experts will find their lives to be a lot more simplified when they use Airtable. It’s fast, efficient, liberating, and empowering.
If anything, Airtable is the future of cloud collaboration services.
