
The three options for getting started with Airtable are to start from scratch, import a data table, or start with a template. The admin panel has been streamlined, performance and monitoring have improved, and base management settings have improved. New automation features include triggering automations at a specified time and generating email previews, the ability to use formulas and lookups in automations, and a cleaner, easier automation UI. Sync integrations include Salesforce, Jira Server and Jira Data Center, Zendesk, GitHub Issues, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Box. Mobile improvements include new mobile views, new calendars, mentions, and mobile data updating.Įxternal source sync lets you continuously pull in data from outside platforms, integrating it directly into your Airtable workflow. The difference between the two is that a Gantt chart includes dependencies so that you can use it to plan a project where one phase requires the completion of another, as is often the case in construction.Įasier view management includes favorite views and collapsible view sections. By creating custom interfaces for your teammates, you can display the information that’s critical to them and avoid distracting details.Īirtable added two new views, the Gantt view and the Timeline view. Interface Designer is a feature available in open beta that lets teams build visual, interactive interfaces using the data already in their bases. What’s new in Airtable?Ģ021 was a big year for Airtable innovation. Note the list of views at the lower left and the starting points at right. The default view for an Airtable base is a grid. The basic difference is that the Airtable development environment is online, not desktop-based. If this reminds you of Microsoft Access, Claris FileMaker, or Alpha Anywhere, welcome to the club. In addition, you can use Zapier, Workato, Integromat, or Automate.io to connect Airtable to mor than one-thousand websites and apps. As we’ll see later, Airtable also supports formulas, automations, and apps.Īirtable integrates with over 30 other products. In addition to allowing record filters and hidden fields, Airtable views support different formats for different purposes: grid view, calendar view, Kanban view, gallery view, Gantt view, timeline view, and form view. Unlike relational database views, Airtable views are not just filtered subsets of the data. Airtable tables have homogeneous fields, like a relational database and unlike a NoSQL database.Īirtable tables can be displayed in an assortment of views. Each base contains one or more tables, and each table contains records (rows) and fields (columns). An Airtable workspace, basically a collection of projects shared among a group of collaborators, contains one or more “bases,” where base is short for database. Airtable conceptsĪirtable is essentially a database in spreadsheet drag. Airtable doesn’t really compete with the basic cloud spreadsheets such as Google Sheets.

That’s an oversimplification: Airtable has several development environments at a variety of skill levels ranging from non-programmers to power users to JavaScript programmers.Īs a database-oriented, low-code/no-code development environment in the cloud, Airtable competes with many of the roughly 400 low-code/no-code app builders on the market, and certainly with the three major, cloud-specific low-code/no-code app builders, Amazon Honeycode, Microsoft Power Apps, and Google Cloud AppSheet. Airtable may look like a spreadsheet in the cloud, but it’s actually more like a relational database in the cloud with its own development environment.
