Airtable is a no-code, cloud-based tool that helps businesses create custom databases. Companies of all types and sizes use Airtable to build databases for marketing, product development, operations, HR, finance, and sales.
Airtable features
Airtable’s intuitive, easy to use interface includes a number of features that enable the app’s customizations. To start, users can choose from hundreds of pre-formatted templates that can then be tweaked as needed. Users can also start by importing a spreadsheet file from Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Or, users can start from a blank base—Airtable’s name for database—and customize everything from scratch. Each base has six customizable views: Grid, Form, Calendar, Gallery, Kanban, and Gantt.
Users can choose from a wide range of apps to enhance the specific function of the base they’re building. For example, Airtable’s pivot table app allows users to summarize records in a pivot table. Similarly, a third-party app by Pexels allows users to browse, search, and attach free stock photos directly from Airtable. Similarly, Airtable offers thousands of integrations with websites and apps like Eventbrite, Facebook, and Gmail to manage data across multiple platforms.
Airtable also supports automations for some of the most repetitive manual tasks that take place in any given base. There are predefined automations that are common for some types of bases, like sending a Slack message when a record is updated, or creating a new record when a Google Calendar event is created. Users can also create custom automations using the if-then model, where an action is triggered based on specified criteria.
Airtable use cases
There are an infinite number of ways to use Airtable. Some of the most common ways include:
- Content calendar to plan blog posts
- Project tracker to monitor tasks and general project progress
- Bug tracker to keep track of reported software bugs
- Product launch timeline to plan and track cross-departmental tasks
- Consumer research database to aggregate data from a large number of sources
- Applicant tracking system to monitor each candidate’s progress through the hiring process
