Page Designer App (Advanced) | Airtable Tutorial

if you're struggling with the page designer block inside of air table then this video is for you we're going to be going into detail on exactly how to set up and use this block and in addition I'm going to be going into some of the most common misuses that I see or the biggest questions I get asked by people who can't seem to get it to work the right way so if that's of interest to you stick around let's get into it hey my name is Gareth Pronovost I'm the owner of gap consulting where we help businesses to get organized and automated with air table and zapier of course this means that they spend less time working in their business and they get to spend more time building their business which of course is the goal of most entrepreneurs so if that's of interest to you definitely check out our channel click Subscribe give this video a thumbs up and all those things so we're releasing new content on that on a regular basis okay that being said though let's just jump into our video here and we're gonna be going into detail on how to build this page designer block but before I get there quick synopsis on how or what we built already okay so this is a pretty standard use case where we've got contacts and books so these are our two main tables and in this case what we're tracking is we want to get book review a data right so all our contacts and we have certain books in our database and then and of course by the way these are horror books because it is almost Halloween as the recording here and then we've got book reviews as well and the book reviews is going to be a junction table between the person the contact and between and the book right so real quick high-level let's look at the data that we keep in each of these tables right and if you're new to this channel again one of the things I always stress is put data points in the right place wherever they exist right so ask yourself this question this thing that I want to record this data point where does it belong right so email well that's a contact data point right that pertains to the people in our database phone number same thing now this is the link to book reviews because each person needs to be connected to a review and then we have a number of reviews and this is where we're counting the number of book reviews that these people are linked to this is a simple count function that's counting the linked book reviews and then we're also seeing an average score that each person is giving on their reviews and so what this is doing is a little bit of math on the back end thanks to the roll up field if you're new to roll up fields check out our video on understanding these but basically what's happening is we're looking at the book reviews for each individual contact and we're looking at the ratings that they've given and then we're taking an average of those so we can quickly and easily see what's the average rating that a reviewer gives every time they review a book all right the next set of data is books and you'll notice by the way there is no direct connection between contacts and books okay that happens in our book reviews table over here this is called a junction table but in our books table of course we have the book title we have the author and then we have the linked relationship to the reviews again this is where if we flip over to reviews you see that we've can we've linked to both the contact and the book itself right and so here we're doing the same thing we're counting the number of times each book gets reviewed and you'll see in this case every book is reviewed exactly three times and then we're also running a calculation same as we did on the contacts table but here we're saying hey what is the average score that each book receives right and so here we have the the reviews we're looking again same concept as before but we're doing a rollup on the reviews connection and we're looking at the rating so these are two different things right that this average is the average score per book and the contact here this is the average score given by the reviewer or the contact okay and then the last table then is reviews and this one's pretty simple this is where we're combining the person and the book with a rating that they've given it okay so that's it for our setup now let's talk about the page designer up block let's pop one open and just get to work you notice that the first we need to do is add the block to our system which I do by clicking add a block and in here you can select page designer right here from the top of the list if you don't see it here just type it in and page designer block is right here once that's added you're going to notice a couple of things first things first it's going to ask you what table are we looking at and so we have three different tables right we have our contacts our book reviews and I'm sorry our books and our book reviews now let's suppose we wanted to look at the data that was relevant to contacts we would select the contacts table and what that's going on and then of course we're gonna pick the size of the page in terms of how big we want this now standard you know page design here would be letter eight-and-a-half by 11 inches here in the US and then you can choose if you're doing portrait or landscape right and then the only other thing here or rather to go back to what we were talking about in terms of what table were selecting is here's and this is the most critical part about the page designer block each time we are looking at a page designer it's going to look at one and only one record ok now this comes up directly against one of the things that I hear the most from clients and they say hey I want to see a lot of things a lot of records on the page designer and that is possible but it's important that those records that you're looking at are linked to the record that you're looking at at a particular time I realize that was a bit confusing the way I phrased it so let me say it again from a different angle right now we have this page designer block looking at our contacts and our contact if we flip out our contacts are linked to book reviews so we can see all of the reviews that are linked to one contact right we know that for example let me shrink this down a little bit but we know that in this case Gareth has reviewed four books so if we're looking at the record for Gareth because we've looked at the contacts table that is where this record lives then we can also see all of the four reviews that Gareth is given and if we look at the record for John Galt we will see the three reviews that John Galt has given but the point here is that the page designer block has to look at one table and one record at a time in order to see those other records that are connected to that record so definitely play around with that a little bit if that doesn't make intuitive sense right now but let's go into this example a little bit further so let's suppose what we wanted to do was print out a report for each person in our database and show all of the things that they'd reviewed well we could start by bringing in the name there we go and we can just up this font size a little bit you see we have a lot of functionality and a lot of ability to make alterations here in terms of the way this presents the weight the height of the line the size of the font the font itself so we have all we can make all these different changes to the way that we're presenting this data and the thing is you know what you what I did here to begin with was I brought in the field from the table that we're looking at so we are looking at again the contacts table so I'm bringing in the name field and the nice part about that is as I flip through my records here by clicking next record you see all of the different contacts one at a time so these are the four different contacts in our database at present okay we can also bring in email address we could bring in phone number etc or we could if we wanted to keep the same formatting we could scroll down oh and I didn't mention text but you can also play with the color make you know make some changes to the color here let me bring this one in and if you want borders you can do that as well all right let's see if I can make that a little cleaner oops I didn't mean to turn those off there we go so you get the idea right a lot of different formatting options that we that we all that we have access to here so once I've gotten that kind of situated I'll click on this again and this is now I'm in the element of the name field you'll see right here because it's fieldname I'm inside of this element if I X out then I'm back at the top level of this and I'm looking at all of the different elements in the table right so what I can do from here if I were to click back into the element I can duplicate this element and this is a much quicker way if we like the formatting that we created this is the fastest way to create multiple elements so now that we're here we have this one and if I wanted to make any changes to it of course I could and let's see what what other things might change here oh I also have the the ability to stack things in terms of order which is which is first if I want to send it to the back or otherwise and oh and then of course also if I wanted to fill in the background with a with a color I could do that as well so let's go ahead and just do that really quickly so you can see I don't like that actually but that's the fastest or the fastest way to take care of that so you've got a lot of different options just in terms of how you're going to structure this and make it you know visually appealing but let me go ahead and get rid of that and then if I want to bring in other things like the the email field for example I can do that I'm not gonna bother formatting all of these things but you can see how I can bring in both the email or a phone number for for somebody and and this is an important part as well as I cycle through the records this information changes based on what's relevant to that particular person so in this case you know this email pertains to this person this phone number pertains to this person and what that's pulling from is just all of this data right here so pretty straightforward but still a little bit confusing if it's your first time using this system now I can bring in an any number of things and one of the cool things I can do is actually bring in some static elements as well so I could write something like um this person has reviewed blood I'm going to put like a big X here X X X number of books and once I've done that you know I can resize that of course however I'd like again I have all the formatting options as well right all the things that we talked about before they're available here even for the static element but the really neat thing that I can do here is actually bring in a dynamic element with the static element and so specifically I want to pull in this number of reviews field and so back inside of my page designer rather than bringing in xx X I'm going to use squiggly brackets open and close and inside of them I'm going to paste the number rather the field name so in this case my field name was pound or hashtag space of space reviews right and this needs to be matched verbatim capitalization included once I've got that matched up you'll see that over here the actual number of that field is showing up and so rather than saying this person has reviewed xxx this number now will change based on the record we're looking at so again if we were to go back to our raw data set you see that everyone's reviewed for books with the exception of john galt who's only reviewed 3 so if I were to look again at this and cycle through my various records still Hank Rearden's seen four books or reviewed four books Dagny has reviewed four but once I get back to john galt you see that three books have been reviewed and so this number is changing with the underlying data set which is awesome now the last part that I want to do that I alluded to earlier is I want to bring in the actual linked data to this person which I can do by accessing the linked data here so book reviews is where we've connected the contact to the books or to the reviews rather so I'll bring that in and let me just go ahead and make this much larger and the first thing that you'll notice is that I have four different relations or four different records here that are being brought in and these are the four different records that have been linked together so these are the four reviews that Gareth has made so let's really quickly flip over to those and take a look at them so over here in the book reviews let me go ahead and apply a filter just temporarily where the contact contains Gareth so now these are the four data points or rather the four reviews that have Gareth as the reviewer and so these are the four reviews that we're seeing here Dracula Hell House Rosemary's Baby and The Shining and so of course they don't have the same order here but they are here I'm going to go ahead and go back into here and we can actually access the other points of data that are associated with these records so specifically I'm gonna let me see if I can find it I'm going to look at the table column section right here and this is where I want to bring in different columns associated with these records so maybe I want to bring in the rating that that Gareth or anybody gave on these various ratings and maybe I don't need to see the review ID because it's a bit redundant we know the person reviewed them is the same as part of the review ID so perhaps instead I want to bring in just the book name itself and you see that I can reorder these things so if I were to move books above rating and let go then they're reordered here in my chart and I can also remove elements of the chart so if I don't want this review ID I can X this element out and now I can see nicely the four different books that Gareth reviewed and the ratings that he gave them last part that I might bring in here Oh before I do that excuse me before I do that you can also add borders here to your table and you can also sort the data so if you want to sort it alphabetically for example for from the books the name of the books you can do so just by clicking a sort okay pretty good and then the last piece that I might want to add here is the average number of reviews that Gareth is given so let me bring this down and I'm actually gonna make this slightly larger and just kind of put it in the center here so see we see the number of books they've reviewed and then I can do something similar down here again this is a static element and I can say the average score the person gave and then here's where I need to bring in that score right so let's flip back over to the contact and here is the average score field I'm going to copy this and go back into my page designer and here I'm going to paste that name of that field in between those squiggly brackets and I can make this a little bit bigger because it's a little hard to read with that smaller font and we can go with that so there we go alright so popping out of here you'll see that as I cycle through my records these this information changes right I see all the books that they reviewed I see the ratings they gave and I see what the average reviewer the average score given by that reviewer is now again the important thing to remember here is we built this page designer looking at the contacts table so if we wanted to see the same kind of data displayed for the books we could do that but it would have to be a different page designer block that we build that looks specifically at the blocks table so I'll leave that to you guys to experiment with on your own but I hope that this quick tutorial has given more insight into what you can do with the page designer block including all the different things that are available with it alright as always I hope you found that to be super helpful if you did and you have some business questions that you'd like to run by us definitely swing by our website the link will be in the description and we offer up times so that we can hop on a call with you you can book directly there and we can set something up that works for both of us what we'll be discussing is building a solution for you they put all of your data in one place and gives you a nice concise dashboard so that you know what's happening in your business at all times additionally we will work on building custom bespoke automation for you so that you can eliminate the time that you spend on repetitive tasks and save countless hours every week so if that's of interest definitely swing by our website and check out the different offers that we have there [Music]

Channel: GAP Consulting

Views: 9,554

Keywords: airtable, tables, block, page designer block, airtable block, airtable page designer block, gareth pronovost, airtable training, airtable consultant, airtable consulting, airtable demo, GAP Consulting, Automated Entrepreneur, Book review in Airtable

Id: WrQImB96kfk

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2019