How to Use Airtable Tutorial (Airtable for Beginners)

hey what's up everybody in today's video I'm gonna show you how you can get your first base to set up an air table in just a few minutes so that's something you've been struggling with stay tuned [Music] [Applause] alright let's get started so you can see right here on my screen I have the main air table dashboard set up and usually when you create a new account they'll actually give you an option to fill out a short questionnaire and from there they'll pre populate a workspace with a few different bases that they might think you'll find useful but for now I've just cleared everything out and we'll start from scratch so a workspace is in the simplest terms just a collection of projects think of the workspace as the main hub for your business and within it you have different sub hubs separated by Department project event even for marketing and you can give permissions to your team based on the top-level workspace or by the base so for high-level team members or even technical support guys they would get workspace access and others might get project specific access so let's create a workspace just click that plus right there and we'll just call this one we'll call this one writing business so at this particular example we're gonna create a workspace for a publication business that publishes our rights articles for several different clients and companies so within my workspace for this particular business I might have a series of bases so a base is short for database which would contain all of the data relevant to a particular project so in the most general sense you might choose your bases based on different departments of your business such as HR related information in one base marketing projects and another product inventory in another and so on but in this particular example we already have that workspace set up so we're gonna create a few different bases specifically for this type of business and with this type of business we might need perhaps a base for marketing a base for projects and maybe even the base to manage all of our freelancers and team so we can click this plus right here to add a base and air table actually gives you additional options right here to create the base with a template air table has a bunch of pre-made templates already but you can also go up here in the upper menu and they have an option called universe which are all user created templates so that's kind of a cool additional feature to give you some ideas or just give you something to work with or else you can import a spreadsheet so if you're coming over from Trello or asana you can take that data in a CSV file and directly create a base from that but for now we're going to start from scratch and we might have marketing you can choose from a few emojis and different colors and actually they give you this option right here for slack notifications as well which is kind of a cool feature it's built right in so every time you update a base with an air table you can automatically update a slack channel as well so that makes it a little simpler than setting up as a pure integration in that particular example and we might create another base for projects this one blue and it's a writing business so maybe I'll do a pencil and just one more maybe teen like that one pink and there we go so we have a few different bases set up and I'm not going to set them all up within this video but just to give you an example of how a basic layout might look and you can customize the view right up here do it with some smaller icons or else in this grid form and you can manage all of your workspaces on the left hand bar right here so for now we're just going to set up the project space so we'll click that open it up and you'll see right now we're in the base dashboard so if you'll notice it kind of looks like a spreadsheet and that's mostly how we'll use it but you'll see up here at the top we have these different tabs which are very similar to tabs and an Excel spreadsheet but an air table these are called tables and a quick sidenote one of the most useful features of air table is that you can directly link records which are basically rows in Excel in one table two records in another table so each table can talk to the other one but we'll have to get into that in a later video so within this base for our article writing business we might need a series of tables that relate to our writing projects so we might have a table to manage writing projects another to keep track of the companies that we do these projects for and another might be for contacts that we have at each company so for example if you have a contact for six months at one particular company and that contact moves on maybe it's hired or fired and replace with another one you can just plug that information right into that table so we'll just set up these tables you can click this drop-down up here rename the table and you can also add table descriptions as well with a short little blurb right there and it'll give you this little icon button so if you have a whole bunch of different team members working on the same table or even for a new employee onboarding that can make things a little bit easier and we'll have this one for companies and contacts so that's generally how you would set up the tables within each base managing all the various data that would relate to a project on different tables depending on how you categorize that specific data so within this particular table view this is the table that we'll be customizing in this video so you'll see these rows and columns which look just like Excel spreadsheets but an air table the rows are called records and the columns are called fields so I'll be using that terminology from now on and one important thing to note is that within air table the first field that you'll see right here on the Left kind of separated by this distinct dark line this field is called a primary field and it can never be hidden or deleted so you'll always have to have this one populated with some kind of data and usually well pretty much always you would want it to have a completely unique ID so we'll use a formula to create that unique ID within this projects table but we'll get into that shortly here beyond that we would need to store a variety of different data all related to each the team's writing projects using a variety of different field types so for starters we might need to store a project name so we'll click this drop down in the second field remember we're getting back to this primary field a little later and we have a drop-down right here where we can customize the field type and we another drop-down and you'll see all these different options right here which makes it kind of easy for the vast majority of the types of fields that you would like and then if you want to get a little more advanced there's always formula field types similar to excel but for this particular field when I use a single line text and we'll call this project name R we could do article name but we'll just keep it kind of generic so the next field that we might need might be the client name R let's let's call it the contact name since we already have this table up here and we'll just use another single line text generally though because we have that other table we could use the link to another record but for simplicity sake we'll stick to the single line text for now and we'll get into the linked records a little later and we might want a article photo so if we're doing blog posts or something there might be some type of photo attached a stock photo for every article and the cool thing is you can store all these attachments these images directly within air table so I've actually ran a business a print-on-demand business where I stored all of the images that would be put on t-shirts and mugs I store them all within that air table rather than going externally to Dropbox or Google Drive so that's another cool and useful feature for us and let's see what next we might we might need to assign it to a writer so create a writer field and we might have one of many different options but to kind of reduce the opportunity for error if we would be manually writing that in for each project we're going to have a single select field type where we've already stored the writers ahead of time and we could just store from a drop-down list and there's another options similar to that called multiple select but in this particular example we would only ever have one writer writing each article so we'll use that field type and we can add an option here let's say writer one writer two and writer three from here we can choose a few different colors if we want one of the features of the paid pro upgrade is that you can add quite a few additional colors but it's not totally necessary especially for kind of a simple table and next we might have a due date for each article so one of the cool fields is a the date feel type and you can choose the format through us or and you can add a time field if you would like but I don't think we'll need that one and this will give you a calendar pop-up right here and with this writer field you'll get the drop down right here so I'm gonna fill in the information for a couple different projects and then I'll get right back to you so you'll see that I added in information for a couple different projects here I'll get rid of this last record I added a project name the contact and I actually uploaded a photo right here which are just some random stock photos and I use this drop-down to choose one of my three writers added a couple due dates and well I had a couple more features here a couple more fields to see what other kind of field types we can incorporate into this particular base so now that I have all those general details about the project I might want to know some financial details so if we're doing for writing articles for different businesses and we're charging them by the word we might want to know we might want to be able to plug in how many words that they require and our rate per word and then just get a total that we can charge them for within the invoice down the line so the way we would do that is first with the field for the word count so we would create a field here and we'll use a number and usually you wouldn't require decimal and we'll fill in some values here so this might be a shorter article and a longer one here and next we'll need a field for the rate per word that we charge for each project because it might be different for every one and we will actually let's see let's actually do a currency field and we'll have two decimals because usually the rates per word are within the pennies so I might charge point zero four for this first project and point zero two for the second project and next we want to use a formula where we can multiply the word count by the rate per word since it's going to be a little different for every project and we don't want to manually calculate these so I'll create a new field called total do and I'm going to select the formula and a real basic formula that we can use here is you can select the first field down here and this drop down or in this scrollable window and use the universal multiply symbol and then add in rate per word and save it so there we go this formula has multiplied both these two fields and given us our new total now it doesn't have the currency symbol right there so we can actually format the field into a currency or a dollar sign will show up and we'll get a currency result now so lastly well I got a couple more fields but lastly I want to show you a cool feature so we're gonna add this last field in here and we use the single select as well and this is going to be for a status the status of each project it might be pending in progress our complete pending will make it read progress yellow and complete will make it green so if you're used to Trello or something we can actually use this status field to create a Trello Kanban type of view based off of the same exact data so that's kind of cool so I'll put this one in progress and this one complete now lastly we need to create that unique primary field ID so we'll customise the field type up here and we'll use a formula again because it's possible that we could have different projects with the same name but for different contacts for example if it's a an article that's a review for an iPad or a review for some other random project it's possible that if we're writing in one particular niche or industry we're writing very similar projects for multiple contacts so we need to know all those details within a unique ID right off the bat and the way we can do that is through a concatenate formula where we'll kind of sandwich two or three values together within this primary field to create that unique ID so we'll do these squiggly brackets first to create this field pop up here and we're gonna sandwich the project name and the contact all within this primary field but we'll need to create a space between them and we can do that with either the and or the comma there so we'll have the project name space - space and then the contact name and that will create our unique primary field ID oh there we go extra squeal so now you'll see that every project has that unique ID right there in the primary field so one more feature that I want to show you is the custom views up here so if you click this arrow right here you can add a view whether it's grid which is kind of the basic spreadsheet view a form that you can use for surveys or questionnaires calendars where you can basically see a calendar view of the data if you have dates date fields and the gallery which kind of looks like an image gallery or the Kanban view which is the Trello of you so we'll create just that custom view for now and we'll use the status that we created earlier and you'll see that all of our data is organized by the status that we chose and if we move each card within the Kanban view it'll automatically update in the spreadsheet view so it's it's all pretty intuitive and there's pretty much every type of view is built into the software so it's limitless the amount of ways that you can use it so I hope that helped you get up and running with err table and if you have any additional questions you can go ahead and let me know in the comments below take it easy

Channel: Process Boost

Views: 76,401

Keywords: airtable for beginners, how to use airtable, how to setup airtable, airtable basics, airtable project management, airtable automation, airtable bases, airtable kanban, airtable kanban board

Id: Kl4cAcy2pRA

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020