Airtable Tutorial | For Beginners

so you're thinking about using error table and i don't blame you it's a very powerful tool so it's a combination of spreadsheets and databases and a very user-friendly you know platform but it can be intimidating right so if you're new to airtable well keep on watching in this video i'm going to cover a very quick basic tutorial to get you going um and understand how airtable works so if you're new to this channel thank you for dropping by hopefully you'll get some value out of it if you do throughout the video please consider giving me a thumbs up otherwise i will go ahead and jump right into the airtable tutorial so here we are in my airtable account and what you'll notice here is that you have what they call workspace so when you log into your airtable account for the first time you'll only have one workspace and it's going to come with some default templates that airtable was kind enough to give you there are a lot of templates that they provide you can definitely check them out but today we're going to go and learn how to create a brand new base from scratch and the term base is really just short for database so what's nice about airtable is that they make it very user-friendly you know you can move your basis around um you can reorganize your bases into a different workspace so i created one is not used and you can always drag a bass down and move it and also have an opportunity to organize your workspaces really simply by clicking this handle on the left side of the navigation and move it up or down so it makes it very very uh nice to organize a lot of different bases because again what's so powerful about airtable is that you can build all these different solutions and organizational or productivity tools all in one place and simply just see it in a nice bird's eye view so let's go ahead and talk through a little bit about how airtable charges its users so it's a subscription based uh product and what they do here is that every workspace is subjected to a subscription so right now i'm running a free account and both workspaces are both free now if you were to upgrade one workspace then all your bases underneath that workspace is subjected to that subscription so definitely keep that in mind um if you do consider upgrading to one of their premium accounts they have a lot of different features and a lot of different useful premium features but for the most part you can get away with the free account the free account comes with a lot it comes with full features and each base each one of these squares can hold up to 1200 records at the date of this recording so that's a lot of records you could do a lot of damage with that and that's per base so that's really really nice so let's go ahead and hop into making our own database so let's go ahead and create a base i'm go ahead and create one and you definitely start with a template but we're going to do one from scratch and in today's tutorial i'm going to do something very very basic we're going to talk about projects and tasks how to tie a task to a project if you were to work on multiple projects now you have the ability to share this base to other people or if you want to share an entire workspace like say you're working on a massive project you can share it up here too it's at the workspace level or you do it at the base level so i just want you you to be aware that that there is a permission feature here which is really nice so let's go ahead and jump into projects all right so we're in our projects database and each project database comes with the ability to create multiple tables of data and so let's go ahead and create our first table it's going to be called projects and then right now default to a grid view but i'm going to call this all projects so that's going to be my all projects view so it's very very clear what what i'm displaying here now we also need to create tasks a set of tasks tied to projects so let's go ahead and create a task table we'll create an empty table hit tasks make it the view as all tasks so what we're going to do here is work with between these two tables um by default error table gives you these fields with name nodes and attachments which is nice but i like to start clean so i'm going to go ahead and delete them i'll right click on the field name go down and delete right click go to delete and then when you notice when i right click on name the very first field i can't delete it why well this is error airtable's way of telling you that it's that's a primary field is required every database or anyone that knows and work with databases you have to have a unique identifier a unique field so error table pretty much mandates that the first field is a primary field so you have to work with it you can't delete it it's what's unique so they enforce it so we're going to leave it as name so this could be our list of project names so let's go ahead and populate this field with data so let's call this project one in project two and project three so we're gonna work with three different projects and then we're gonna see how we can tie a set of tasks to a project so let's go ahead and do that let's go to the task table and create our tasks so similarly i'm going to go ahead and delete these fields and start from scratch and then start putting my task so let's say project 1 we have one task for project one and then the question is how do we tie this task to a project well this is where the power error table comes in when you start to build relational databases so we're going to tie these two tables together so let's go ahead and do that right now let's click on a new field and call it projects and then when you select the field type you'll notice the very first option is linked to another record that's what we're going to do and then we have a choice either we're going to link it to a project or link it to a task and in case you want to do dependencies but really want to link it to our project so let's go ahead and do that and most importantly we have to understand what this means so by default error table thinks that this particular relationship is a one to many relationship meaning you can have one task tied to multiple projects which could be very true however for my intent i want to tie a specific task to a specific project so i'm going to turn this off i want to create a one-to-one relationship with my task so i'll go ahead and hit save and then go ahead and select project one project one is now tied to task one um let's say there's two more tasks and then what i want to do is tie it to project two so we're gonna go ahead and select project two for both of them and then i'm gonna keep adding another task let's say task four and i want to tie it to project three and let's say i want to add more tasks really quickly so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go and hit this plus sign three more times and i'm just gonna go ahead and drag project three down to that data and then do task five task six and task seven so the last few tasks will be tied to project three so i essentially made a relationship i've now associated the task with a project let's go back to the projects tag table and see what happened so error table automatically created a new field type called task it's basically saying that it's tied to this table to these records so we'll use this in a moment but i want you to be aware that it was auto populated by air table so we're gonna go back to task because we're gonna finish up this table and let's think about what else makes up a task what else do you need well you might want to know who owns that task so let's go ahead and put an owner and we want to do a drop down so one of popular field times is a single select where you can do options so we're going to do a team member let's do team member one enter team member two and that's you have a third team member team member hit save and then next you know we have a drop down so let's go ahead and populate this field as we go so team member one project one task one and i'm gonna team number two team number three and let's go ahead and have team number three do a few more tasks here make this one team member two and the last one team member one just kind of gives some variety of assignments so now we know the owner well for every task it might be a good idea to know what the status of that task is so let's go ahead and create a status field and do the exact same thing let's do a single select and let's think about our statuses either could be not started in progress and completed and let's go ahead and highlight this a little bit like we have the option to customize the colors let's make completed green because we're green to green is good green to go i think progress is yellow kind of like you know yellow kind of like getting ready to to could be completed and so let's go ahead and set save and then let's go ahead and look at our drop down and there we have it so let's go say the first task is in progress and the next one is not started not started let's go and pick completed for this one um so we're gonna go ahead and populate some of these fields randomly like like so all right so we got our statuses populated now it'd be a really good idea to have a due date for a task wouldn't you agree so let's go ahead and add a due date for each of these tasks and there is a date field so if i type in date there you go it filters it out there's my selection hit save leave it at default settings and i'm just going to pick a random date and i'm just going to copy and paste it down just for representation purposes so now you have a due date for each of your tasks so once you have your due date you're like maybe there's a good way to visually see what has been completed though it's nice to see the color green but perhaps we want to do like a really quick check mark so airtube has that feature let's say it's called completed as a question and then they have a check box that you can select check box right there and we could choose different ways of showing it but we're going to stick with the green check mark hit save now we have this little visual so now i'm going to go ahead and mark this one complete and this one complete again this is redundant it's more of a visual thing but i want to kind of show you this feature and some of the popular field types that you will use um when you're playing around with air table so now we have this nice little checkbox feature to kind of visually show us how many tasks have been marked complete now the next thing that is very powerful is creating custom views so i think we got our task for the most part all the all the details we need for this particular task um let's go ahead and create a custom view so we're going to create another grid view it's going to start from scratch and let's say we want to group it by projects grouped by projects because it's nice to see it all in one place like this but it's really hard to visually see what tasks especially if you go out of order right it's all over the place it won't be as organized so this group by projects will be um a much easier way to see that so by doing so we'll use this group feature hit group pick a field to group by we're gonna pick projects and it's gonna be alphabetical order and there you go project one is all grouped with one task project two has two and project three has four tasks and this is really really nice and useful because now you can visually see all your tasks no matter how you kind of like organize it from to begin with and it does it nicely here so let's say for example i go back to the original view and i decided to add another task let's say task eight and i wanted to assign because again go out of order i'm gonna go ahead and sign into project two so i'm gonna go pick project two and then i'm pretty much gonna pick a random team member say it's not started it's brand new and i'm going to pick another date there you go now you see how it's out of order but if you go back to the project view group by projects project 2 has that task nicely organized the way you want it to and you can make the updates here if i make that update to project two make sure it says not you know make it as completed and flag as completed and go back to the other view there you go you see that last record has been updated so it's really nice to do that and you can also have the ability to add it in the group view itself so you go back to group by projects and let's say i want to add another task to project one so i add another task here task nine and it's already defaulted project one which is really nice because it knows you're in that grouping pick a different team member not started and then pick another date okay there you have it and when you go back to the original view task 9 has already been populated so this is really nice to organize it all in one place without having separate worksheets or have to create you know custom views here it's all in one place very easy doesn't mess with the data so this is great when visualizing your task with a project but what about your projects how do you sum up all the information here well that's why you create this relationship so under the projects table this is where we can go ahead and take the information from this relationship and start to sum it up so let's say you want to know the total number of tasks for every project so let's go ahead and create a field called total number of tasks okay and then we're going to create a formula but the way air table works is called a rollup because what it does it's going to roll up the data from that table so we're going to go ahead and select roll up it's going to look at the task field and then you have all these options that you want to i guess roll up or summarize but let's go ahead and pick name let's count the number of tasks so i'm going to use the count field and then i'm going to go down to what they call count a which is basically for um text so i'm gonna go ahead and select count a and hit save so now you got the total number test two three and four let's go ahead and see if it's accurate because this is why this field was automatically created it tells you the associations it matches the results and so you can see how project one has these two tasks task one and task nine if you go back to task you can see task one task nine right there so this is great as a way to audit your results now let's go ahead and create a completed task well now you got your total task let's go count the number of completed tasks so we'll do the same thing here is total tasks completed and then we do a roll up and then we're going to select completed field under the task table and we're going to actually do a sum because the task is going to count the number of checks so let's go ahead and hit sum and hit save and there you have it so we have zero tasks completed for project one one for project two and two for project three so let's go ahead and verify that so there's only one completed for project two so look at project two there we have one check project three we have two checks so it matches the results now what can we do with this data is create a formula we want to know a percent complete maybe we want to know of all the tasks how many do we complete in a percentage way so i'm just really doing this to demonstrate um the power of having formulas here very slow to excel or any other spreadsheet that you have used before in the past but um let's go ahead and create a formula called percent completed and then we're going to make a formula type in form formula and what's nice about it is it's very straightforward you just type in the field name let's say it's total number of total task completed i'll put total there's total task completed divided by the forward slash and i type in total number of tasks by typing total and total number of tasks because it's pre-filtered and then hit save but what's interesting enough is that it shows it as an integer i have to change the format so let's go ahead and double click on that and go to formatting and change the format to be a percentage and hit save there we have it now we got an accurate percentage based on the total task completed over the total number of tasks so this is where it's really powerful um hopefully you got a lot of value out of it and learned the power of how to build relational databases using tables and how they're linked and tied together and you know for this purpose here for a dashboard we don't really need this auto populated field because visually it's not appealing if you want to make this into a very simple dashboard you can simply right click or hide it or simply hit the hidden field and toggle and check which fields you want to hide so it makes a very clean view if you get a quick update on where your projects are this is a very simplified view but also get a good idea where you can look at your total task and monitor it on an individual basis so that pretty much does it for this tutorial hopefully it really gives you a good idea how to build relationships how to use some of the more popular fields and really really see the power of organize organizing the data and then using formulas to summarize that data as well too so again if you found this video helpful um please give me a thumbs up um and if you have any questions at all please comment below um i would i try to answer all the comments the best i can and uh hopefully i catch you guys in the next one alright take care i'll talk to you soon

Channel: Lessons Unlocked

Views: 42,554

Keywords: airtable tutorial, airtable training, airtable consultant, airtable consulting, airtable demo, gareth pronovost, zapier tutorial, airtable training videos, gap consulting, airtable training course, airtable demonstration, airtable demo youtube, airtable tutorial videos, airtable tutorial youtube, small business ideas, business ideas, work from home, business idea, business ideas for teenagers, business ideas for students, how to use airtable, airtable for beginners

Id: zEOX3i4UWZg

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020