Three Common Airtable Mistakes

hi my name is Gareth Pronovost and I'm an air table consultant in this video I'm gonna be walking through the top three misuses that I see time and time again with my clients in their bases so you know over time you start to see patterns and trends developing and the this video is really gonna serve to point out those three ways that I see people building bases that just really isn't optimal I'm not gonna say it's wrong but I'll call it a misuse just you know ways that you could get more out of air table so in this video I'm going to go through those top three ways do a little countdown for you and of course most importantly provide you with the right way or the the optimal way of addressing these things so that you get the most value out of your databases as possible so without further ado let's jump on into it welcome to entrepreneurship by the numbers where we help unlock the potential of your business with data-driven metrics alright so jumping on into a base here my number three misuse case that I see time and time again with air table is this so when you start at base some scratch you're gonna have these three fields you've got name you've got notes and you've got attachments and I think that this number three thing comes from the fact that you've got notes and it has to do with the way that you can collaborate in the base and so I see people time and time again leaving notes for each other like spoke to client on on such-and-such a day right I'll see a note like that in a base and it's a it's an interesting thing because I don't know why you would put it in here on the record in this way and so the actual like I would call it the preferred way of doing that would actually be to expand the record and so you can either hit the spacebar or click on these arrows right here and so inside the base you see here on the right this is where you can actually collaborate with your team and leave notes so rather than changing this field to spoke to client on a date I could just leave that comment here and now anybody who's paying attention to this record is going to get a notification and you see here it's because of watching so it I'm gonna be notified whenever somebody comments on the record and that's because I've commented on the record also if I want to deliver like someone's attention directly to this I can do an app reference now this base is an example base so it's only to me but if anyone else that you're sharing a base with you can do an app reference and the really cool thing is that's gonna push notification them in three ways or they're gonna receive notification in three ways so the first way is up here on the little alerts so any notification that you have up here you'll see a one two four you know count increase here depending on how many times records have been commented on that you're watching then there's another two more ways that you can have notifications as well and you can come here to your notification preferences and you see that you've got mobile push notifications and this is if you have the mobile version downloaded on your phone you'll just receive a push notification on your phone and the other way is email by default both of these are gonna be checked I believe for me personally I think that the email is just a little bit overwhelming it's just like paying ping ping and my inbox fills up and I just I don't need it so I've unchecked this but you know experiment with these and figure out what works best for you so when you're collaborating with your team don't use you know specific field just for notes when you have something to say to a particular team member or just the whole team needs to know just put it on the right-hand side of the record itself best part is you'll even see here that you've got a comment here now now that I left that comment there's a there's a number floating here so everybody knows that you know if someone's made a comment on this record so definitely check that out start commenting this way and you'll see your workflows improve in a big way alright now heading on into my number to misuse case for air table and it really has a lot to do with integrations in order to automate your procedures within your business so most of the time you're going to be using zapier for this so air table has a really great integration with zapier where you can program automations from your air table base so that things happen automatically under certain conditions and the way you do this most of the time is by setting zapier to look at one particular view in your base and when you do this when you create a unique view the problem is if somebody goes in behind and alters this view then it's gonna break the whole automation like I mean just putting in an extra field or you know changing a filter or something could break that entire automation and then you're just like you won't even know for potentially days and you'll think that everything's working like normal in your business and then all of a sudden you realize oh you know we haven't been doing these tasks that we thought were being taken care of automatically so let's jump on into this example here so let's say I have this situation and this actually came from a client just the other day so you've got some tasks and let's suppose that what you want to have happen is if you have a task that's overdue and it's not complete yet you want the air table to send you an automatic email excuse me not air table it would be zapier sending you an email to say hey you've got an overdue tasks and it's not done so here's here's what we are really looking at right we've got an overdue formula here and here's the formula if you want to take a look it's just saying if the due date is bigger than today then we're gonna say no it's not overdue and if the due date is bigger than today we're gonna say yes so this is a simple if statement and and so today as of the filming this is it's August 19th so August 20th is gonna say no and everything before the 19th will say yes it's overdue now it could be overdue if it's done no problem but if this is unchecked task three here is obviously overdue so what we want is to set up a zapier to send an email to ourselves to say hey task three is overdue how do we do that well we need to build our zapier view and our zapier view is gonna be filtering these two things it's going to filter where the overdue formula is yes and we're complete is not checked these are the two conditions that have to be met in order for something to come into this field and so what we're doing is just setting up a particular view and we don't want this view to ever be messed with because if it is like I said it's gonna break our integration so the way that we do this and this is this is a super super easy way to fix this and it's a relatively new feature in air table is locking that view down we need to go in and select lock to view and we can say why we can say this is a zapier integration and if we say that you know then our team would know okay well that's why it's locked and now that it's locked we cannot click these formulas I'm trying to click if I were to try to click and you know make changes here it's not gonna let me and so you can see here it's saying this view is locked and the whole purpose of this is to make sure that this view doesn't break and this is the way that we can keep all of the parts of our business that are integrated with zapier and various automation software's we can keep them all exactly how we need them if we don't do this things can go haywire and we won't even know all right now finally down to my number one biggest misuse of air table that I see over and over again and that really comes down to how people are planning out their bases and what they think needs to happen in the flow of work so very common thing that I see in the forums and with my clients before I start working with them is they think that let's say there's two steps to two major stages within the workflow so maybe something has six different steps it has step ABC and that's part of workflow one and then once step when where once workflow one is done then it goes into workflow two and then it has steps de F so we've got ABC with the first workflow de F with the second workflow and what I see over and over again is people thinking that they want to build two separate tables for this where they have a table that goes ABC and then as soon as it hits you know done with workflow one they want it to show up in a second table and then though again they're gonna finish out you know work steps de F and again this isn't wrong you could build as app in zapier to do this and get that information over there and it's it's not technically wrong but it's kind of a misuse and here's the reason and so let's jump on in if you have this you could have you know steps ABC in one phase and then you could have steps de F in a second phase now here's the here's the way to do this is build Kanban views for yourself so this is going to be workflow number one and you're going to look at phase one and now for this you have your orders and you can place them throughout here and it's only when they get to step C that you want them to show up on the next workflow right so here's what we're gonna do for this we're gonna build a second workflow in another Kanban View workflow number two and we're gonna look at phase two for our stacking and now we're gonna set a filter we're gonna add a filter where workflow or where phase one is only step C and the reason for this is it needs to move through workflow one before we are gonna put it into workflow two right and so it's only if it's reached step C that we're gonna allow it to go into d EF and so we're putting a filter on here and now we're only seeing those workflows that we put into step C and so now we can move those pieces and move them throughout the workflow for our second workflow no need to build two tables here no need to build crazy zaps as you see it's pretty you know simple and straightforward you just need to organize it in the right way with two and going back to that grid view if you wanted to duplicate this all I've done here is used two single select variable fields and then set those single select fields up in the appropriate way alright well I hope you found that to be really useful as always if you have any questions or comments please do leave them below the video and I will definitely address those as quickly as I can and if you have any custom work that you'd like or some consulting assistance that I could provide there is a link to my calendar below in the description so definitely check that out and in the meantime best of luck as you continue to grow your empire [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: GAP Consulting

Views: 55,380

Keywords: airtable, zapier, automatically update airtable, airtable integration, gareth pronovost, airtable mistakes, airtable errors, airtable consultant, airtable training, entrepreneurship by the numbers, airtable consulting, airtable help, airtable troubleshooting, GAP Consulting

Id: Z-6Q0R9-nLI

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018