6 ms·

Just curious - what do you use airtable for exactly? When do you need a structured database with many collaborators? Airtable and the like strike me as a data

Just curious - what do you use airtable for exactly? When do you need a structured database with many collaborators? Airtable and the like strike me as a database tool for dummies who want 'anyone change anything anytime', which is just a recipe for no one knowing who the hell is changing what and when anymore.

bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
"anyone change anything anytime" is much better than "hey can you email me that excel file? I'll make a few changes and then email it back to you" "actually I don't have the latest version, Person X has it and they're currently merging someone else's changes, so be patient"
xupybd 6y ago
Yeah it's common in business. Normally it's in a spreadsheet on a shared drive, so this is a step up. Businesses change fast and don't always have internal development resources to create an application to do this sort of thing.
chrisdone 6y ago
It’s my understanding that the main selling feature of AirTable is the hard coded views that they offer; calendars, kanban style planners, things like that. The slightly more structured nature of relational tables over spreadsheets lets you implement those fairly reliably.
auxym 6y ago
I use the free tier as a collaborative Kanban board for a tiny 5 person team. Airtable allows me to define arbitrary fields for the Kanban cards, which happens to be a premium/paid feature in all the actual Kanban saas tools (Trello, etc).
- sofixa 6y ago
  It isn't on Jira if you're <10 users, but Jira is a whole lot more than just Kanban and a huge beast.
  - auxym 6y ago
    JIRA would not just overkill but a bad fit for us, potentially requiring extensive configuration. We're an academic research lab that also happens to do contractual work for other labs (mostly internal to the university), mostly designing and building mechanical prototypes and testbeds for other researchers. It took like 5 minutes to set up an airtable base to track our WIP and all information we use for billing our "customers": hours, material purchased, internal budget reference, etc.
- onetom 6y ago
  It sounds like https://notion.so https://notion.so can do that too, besides being a real-time collaborative document editor, wiki, spreadsheet, etc etc
sporkland 6y ago
Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes (and to a lesser extent SharePoint) both had these characteristics and are quite popular for the long tail of business processes that aren't covered by dedicated vendors. The only problem is the tech tends to age and it becomes hard to migrate the 1000+ bespoke "apps" that live inside the enterprise.

bobbylarrybobby 6y ago

"anyone change anything anytime" is much better than "hey can you email me that excel file? I'll make a few changes and then email it back to you" "actually I don't have the latest version, Person X has it and they're currently merging someone else's changes, so be patient"

xupybd 6y ago

Yeah it's common in business. Normally it's in a spreadsheet on a shared drive, so this is a step up. Businesses change fast and don't always have internal development resources to create an application to do this sort of thing.

chrisdone 6y ago

It’s my understanding that the main selling feature of AirTable is the hard coded views that they offer; calendars, kanban style planners, things like that. The slightly more structured nature of relational tables over spreadsheets lets you implement those fairly reliably.

auxym 6y ago

I use the free tier as a collaborative Kanban board for a tiny 5 person team. Airtable allows me to define arbitrary fields for the Kanban cards, which happens to be a premium/paid feature in all the actual Kanban saas tools (Trello, etc).

sofixa 6y ago
It isn't on Jira if you're <10 users, but Jira is a whole lot more than just Kanban and a huge beast.
- auxym 6y ago
  JIRA would not just overkill but a bad fit for us, potentially requiring extensive configuration. We're an academic research lab that also happens to do contractual work for other labs (mostly internal to the university), mostly designing and building mechanical prototypes and testbeds for other researchers. It took like 5 minutes to set up an airtable base to track our WIP and all information we use for billing our "customers": hours, material purchased, internal budget reference, etc.
onetom 6y ago
It sounds like https://notion.so https://notion.so can do that too, besides being a real-time collaborative document editor, wiki, spreadsheet, etc etc

sporkland 6y ago

Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes (and to a lesser extent SharePoint) both had these characteristics and are quite popular for the long tail of business processes that aren't covered by dedicated vendors. The only problem is the tech tends to age and it becomes hard to migrate the 1000+ bespoke "apps" that live inside the enterprise.