Airtable: Project Planner
While working on group projects, it is truly vital to organize your workflow consistently and productively. You can use a spreadsheet, which works well for smaller projects. But what if you’re building something more complicated, with a bigger team involved? You can definitely use a database, but it might be too time-consuming and also require some SQL knowledge.
That’s where project planners and organizers come into play.
The market offers tons of different options. For our current project, my partner suggested that we use Airtable and I found this one pretty intuitive and easy to implement.
Airtable is a cloud-based software company that combines a traditional spreadsheet with a database. Wikipedia mentions that the fields in an Airtable table are similar to cells in a spreadsheet, but have types such as ‘checkbox’, ‘phone number’, and ‘drop-down list’, and can reference file attachments like images. Also, a user can create a database, set up columns and records — and collaborate with other users, which makes it really helpful for group projects.
Airtable has a colorful and simple user interface, so it’s easy to set up and use without any previous knowledge about SQL structure.
Airtable has 6 basic components:
- Bases are databases with all the information you need to create your project. You can give them any name that makes sense for you. Airtable provides a lot of templates with relevant sample data that are highly recommended to use for a painless set up of your project. However, you can also build a Base from scratch, from a spreadsheet, or an existing Base.
- Workspaces are collections of Bases.
- Tables are Airtable’s spreadsheets. A Base is a collection of tables, and each table hosts its type of information you need for a project.
- Records are rows and cells in the table. Each record is equivalent to one item. You can also create associations between records in different tables via links which makes it really easy to get information between the tables.
- Fields are entries in a table. Airtable currently offers 16 basic field types. For example, single-line texts, long text articles, file attachments, check-boxes, etc.
- Views represent a way to see some filtered records. For example, you want to see all the images that you have in a certain table.
Hope you enjoy using Airtable for your projects!
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