Airtable

Pros

Airtable is fantastic for project management, especially if you need to share your work with others. I recently used Airtable for a week-long event at my workplace with many moving parts - several events per day, many catering contracts, many chaffeurs and cars to keep track of, etc. I love that Airtable gives you the option to categorize entries and sort by category. Using Airtable helped me keep track of all my tasks involved in coordinating the events.

I also like how easily you can share it with others and work on it with others. The interface is clean and works well for me both on my desktop and tablet.

The last thing I like most about this software is the ability to have an attachment field. When coordinating travel for myself and others, I appreciate being able to attach our flight itineraries, travel approvals, and any other important documents directly to the table. It's a great way to keep it all in one place.

Cons

Airtable does have a bit of a learning curve that took me a while to navigate. I did not find their introductory templates or videos as helpful as I would have liked, so it took me longer than anticipated to get used to the software and really start using it on a daily basis.

Lastly, I really wish Airtable was FERPA compliant. I work in higher education and so I cannot manage ALL my projects and tasks in Airtable, just the ones that don't involve student data. This splitting of softwares depending on which project I'm working on is kind of a pain and interrupts my work flow.

Pros

I love that this works as an Excel document, but you can also do so much more with it - attach documents, check boxes, drop down options, and so many more things. It has great integrations with other platforms, and is easy to set up for various different functions that Excel could never offer. I also love the extra blocks you can use that give you more options for functions, such as creating pivot tables, sending texts, keeping an organizational chart, and even setting a countdown! It makes me want to explore more ways I can use this to help make our workflow better within my work team.

Cons

It does take a little getting used to at first if you are used to excel. It's not quite a replacement for Excel if you are trying to make a traditional sheet with borders, and it also isn't as easy to highlight select cells and copy/paste them in other places like in an Excel sheet. It also doesn't really support traditional Microsoft formatting which is kind of annoying when you try to copy information in. But seeing as how this is a better system for containing information, its pros outweigh the cons and you can easily use Excel and Airtable at the same time to support your various needs.

Pros

I love the customization options. I also really appreciate the aesthetics, how easy it is to hide/unhide/move fields, the filter abilities, the blocks for bulk editing, the linking between records, and so so much more.

Cons

There are still some pieces missing that would be super useful for us (the ability to read a cell's contents and apply if-then results and not just count the contents, for instance). And it can get expensive quickly if you have a big team.

Pros

Before Airtable, pre formatted databases were costly platforms to subscribe to, and extremely difficult to create from scratch (for the non coder).

Airtable is just dead easy to use. It looks like a spreadsheet but behaves like a database. You can import or export data as a CSV file. You can share a link or embed a view into you website using iframe code.

It is also lightning fast. You can link any number of different 'sheets' together. You can selecting different types of 'fields' ie numerical, date, multiple select, calculations, upload document etc.

You can also display your data in a range of 'views' from maps to calendars to gallery views of pie and bar charts.

Cons

When using the embed code option, it doesn't show that well on a mobile device. Apart from that, it's really the perfect software for people with a large amount of data and no code skills.

Pros

When a co-worker recommended Airtable, I was predictably skeptical. Who needs yet another spreadsheet software I said, with an internal (ok, maybe external) eye roll. But this is no mere spreadsheet platform. It is the only one you will ever need. Ever. Again. The functionality that make it worth it to switch from Excel or Google Sheets might seem insignificant when you look at them on a features list. Colored labels, grouping, filtering, view options, etc. But you have no idea what a big difference they make! Airtable makes it possible to put in all the data you have, but the key to its success is it lets you filter it down to only the essential information you need to see to make the decisions in front of you. It's the database that actually helps with decision-making. And the more I use it, the more uses I find for it!

Cons

There are very few cons to Airtable. It's simple to use, and the potential is limitless. Once you start putting bases together, you just don't want to stop! One thing that is slightly non-intuitive is the relationship (or lack thereof) between different "tabs" of data. Read up on those before you go that route. You can also start getting out of hand pretty quickly with creating lots of different views, but nothing a little intentionality can't address. We trained our entire team on using Airtable for project management, and it's been the best decision we ever made.