Productive & Organized: Airtable

Welcome to Productivity Month 2021! This past year many of us had to put our lives and businesses on hold due to the global pandemic, but now it’s time to put 2020 behind us. Each week this month we will be featuring a new productivity tool that can help you build your business back stronger than ever. All of the tools are affordable, cloud-based, and built to scale with your business. If you have questions about any of the tools featured, feel free to contact us at Contact@BlueSparkSolution.com.

Most of the productivity tools we have featured up to this point have a very specific role and function in your business workflow. But what do you do with everything else that there isn’t a pre-packaged solution for? Each business is different, and yours likely has some nuances that aren’t covered by traditional software. That’s where Airtable comes in. With the motto “organize anything,” Airtable is a database builder that can be used to organize and automate parts of your workflow that fall outside the realm of other apps.

What does it do?

Airtable is used to build databases, so at its core, it works a lot like a spreadsheet. The key difference, however, is that you can build in relationships between objects in the database. You can also connect Airtable to different apps and automate tasks based on information in the database. This makes Airtable much more like a drag-and-drop app builder than a typical spreadsheet. You can easily build an HR or vendor management platform, content calendar, product roadmap, event planner, or almost anything you think of. You can customize field types to make sure the information you need stays organized. And you can also view your data as a table, calendar, gallery, kanban board, or form.

Why does it matter?

As they say, the devil is in the details. With many businesses already running on thin profit margins, there is no room for error. Airtable helps you get all of the details right. Whether it is keeping track of contract renewals, employee time off, or the next blog post, Airtable enables you to keep all of the critical information you need up-to-date and at your fingertips.

Why We Recommend Airtable

Flexible

Airtable is so flexible that it is almost intimidating.

Airtable can be used to organize so many different business areas that it is like the Swiss army knife of productivity software.

Collaborative

Airtable makes it easy to share the data you have organized with people inside and outside of your organization. You can post a widget of your database to your website to display real time updates. And you can comment on records and track changes internally.

Easy-to-Integrate

Airtable integrates with other common workplace tools, making it easy to add data and files from these platforms.

Top Productivity Features

Filtering & Grouping

One of the key tests of any database is how easy it is to find the data you are looking for. With filters & groups, Airtable makes finding information a breeze. You can filter by any field in the database with intelligent qualifiers to hone in on the information you’re looking for. With groups, you can sort by a status field to see all of the items with that status and a calculation of each column.

Apps

Airtable Apps allow you to use and display information in your database. You can create a dashboard with charts of your most important information, a mail merge template, or a visual org chart. See the App Marketplace here.

Automations

With automations, you can trigger automated actions to occur based on information in the database. For example, you could send an automated email to employees whose expense reports are late. You could also update data automatically by building in formulas.

These are just a few of the many features Airtable has to offer. We recommend checking out Airtable’s extensive template library for more ideas about what you can do with the tool. If you’re interested in learning more about Airtable, set up a free consultation today.

We Create Airtable Databases

One of the ways that we provide value to our clients is by creating and maintaining databases for them in Airtable. We work with companies of all sizes to maximize their use of Airtable and make sure that their implementation process is seamless. Contact us today to discuss how we can help your business be more productive this year with Airtable.