When you need a database but not really
Or, how I became an Airtable superfan
It started with a video on Facebook. “Welcome to Airtable,” the cheerful voice said. “With Airtable, you can organize anything.”
I usually don’t pay attention to ads on social media, but this one intrigued me. Airtable promised the functionality of a database with the simplicity of a spreadsheet. And while I was more experienced with spreadsheets than your average journalist (I had a previous life in the federal government where spreadsheets are ubiquitous), there were times when a spreadsheet just didn’t have the dimensions I needed. And while I could figure out how to query a database that was already built, creating my own seemed too daunting.
But I could see the potential in Airtable, especially at work. Over time, our tracking systems were growing unwieldy, covering more than a dozen Google Docs full of overlapping information. Updating all of them was time consuming, and if you missed one, then the data no longer matched. We needed a better solution. And Airtable was an obvious answer.
When a Google Sheet isn’t enough
In its simplest form, Airtable is just a fancy spreadsheet. That makes it easy to use when you first start — it’s pretty familiar even if you’ve never used it before. But Airtable lets you connect data, change how it’s presented and even automate functions in fairly simple ways that make it more useful than if you’ve been using spreadsheets to keep track of everything. Plus, all your data lives in the same place, rather than in multiple spreadsheets.
That said, if you want to start using Airtable, I’d recommend a bit of reconnaissance. You can start reading through the basics in Airtable’s Help site. If you’ve got access to LinkedIn Learning, this course can be helpful. (I took the course before I started building my first Airtable, and it was particularly useful for strategizing.) And there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube, as well. Airtable also has frequent trainings and webinars for new features that they notify users about in their newsletter.
In my job, we now use a complex Airtable base with multiple tables to manage story flow, the publishing schedule, writer information, Instagram, invoicing and more, all in one place. We no longer worry about keeping multiple tracking systems updated. We have dashboards for things like spending and automatic to do lists for each person on staff. And when certain pieces of data get updated in Airtable, we get automatic notifications in Slack that we need to do tasks.
This did take time and planning to set up and continued effort to maintain and tweak. But it was worth it. It made my life — and that of my coworkers — much easier.
Paying for Airtable gets you more functionality (additional views for your data, color coding, more lines of data), but for a lot of uses, the free version will work just fine. For instance, when I was trying to organize all of the purchases I needed to research, purchase and have delivered for my house renovation, I created a new free base in Airtable. I use Airtable to manage the Systematic Scribe. And I even created a free template in Airtable for running your own freelance writing business. (You can find instructions and a link to the template here.)
The color-coding would have been enough to get me to try Airtable. But it’s the functionality and ease of use that keeps me going back, even for simpler projects.
So if you’ve got a lot of data to organize, you might want to give Airtable a try.
And if you learn a great trick on Airtable, please let me know. I’m always looking for ways to improve the bases I run.
What I’m reading
Geeky Gadgets has a roundup of five Goggle AI tools to help you organize your digital life, including your photos and email. Using Gemini as a personal assistant sounds interesting, though I’m not sure I’m ready to hand over my life to an AI just yet.
Next time: Why you should consider giving everything a deadline.
— Sarah
P.S. If you’ve got a question, comment or idea for a future newsletter, please email me at sciwriter.sarah@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. And if someone forwarded this to you (hint, hint), check out my first post and what you can expect from The Systematic Scribe.
The Systematic Scribe is free. I have no current plans to have paid subscriptions — but if you like what you read and would like to support this work, you can Buy Me a Coffee.