What do you like best about the product?

Ever since adopting Airtable, our workflows and processes have been revolutionized. I love how easy it is to get up and running with basic features. There are many transferable skills one can bring over from spreadsheets and other project management systems that makes implementation fairly seamless. Much of the program is intuitive, and for some of the more advanced features there are excellent resources, from the impeccable customer service, to myriad online videos, and the incredibly supportive and enthusiastic Airtable community.

Moving our workflows over to Airtable has made it so easy to keep our projects organized. What had previously been a mess of a Google Drive with folders, drives, sheets, etc. is now able to live in a handful of bases, keeping all project materials and data in one place. Being able to sync bases has also allowed us to utilize a central source of truth across our organization. Everyone is pulling from the same verified datasets, and if we update the data set, it updates everywhere.

Automating is its own cause for celebration as we've save hundreds of hours on repetetive tasks. Our organization uses automations to send reminder emails, update records when they match certain conditions, automatically link records, run simple scripts, and essentially keep track of all of the administrative details for a variety of processes. We use it for applications that require letters of recommendation, reviews from inside and outside constituents, and tracking assignments. We use it for our marketing and event planning. We use it track and administer service tickets. We even use it for staff meetings to track notes and tag employees to follow-up tasks.

We also love interfaces. Initially, some staff we wary of learning a new program, and the data layer of Airtable felt overwhelming. Interfaces allowed us to share specific data points in a much more digestible format. It's high level dashboards with the ability to drill down into specific data points is extremely helpful for supervisors and managers on our team. Likewise, all the different ways to visualize data allow us to create extremely efficient and customized workflows for staff and outside users alike.

Most of my day is spent working in Airtable, and it's always a joy to listen to colleagues ask, "Can Airtable do X?" and then watch them light up when I show them not only can it do X, but it can do Y and Z too! And, for the rare times a native Airtable feature can't quite do the trick, it's easy to integrate 3rd party apps into your Workspace. Likewise, for those who want to keep their Google Suite, Airtable can create and update Google docs, create and edit calendar events, and even append rows to Sheets or create records from a Google Form.

It's made life so much easier in our office that I even have a personal base to track home projects, and I've brought Airtable to our school's PTO!

I haven't even touched on AI or formulas or forms - or lots of other features! - but I can't overstate how life-changing this program was to our office.

What do you dislike about the product?

We're fortunate to have an enterprise license in our organization, but for others outside, I've seen that limited access to certain features if you're on a lower level plan can be a pain. For me personally, there are some design elements of the dashboards that I'd like more control over. There are also minor things like their forms allow you to implement a character limit, but not a word limit.

Likewise, there are times when to get Airtable to do the thing you want, you sometimes have to think up slightly elaborate workarounds. Even then, though, there is a feeling of accomplishment (at least for me) for having solved the puzzle, and once you've set it up, it just runs in the background. Very often there are updates that roll out that address some of these issues, in which case it's a little annoying to undo the more complex solution to utilize the streamlined update.

But that's about it. I'm sure there are other little things like with any software where it's loading slowly one day, but honestly, there's so much more to love about Airtable.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It's making our workflows more systematized and transparent. We have more data integrity, and are freeing up a ton of administrative time. It's allowed our team to be more responsive, data-informed, and spend more time on our values and core mission rather than getting bogged down in nitty gritty admin. It's making our funding programs much easier to apply to and review in a fair and unbiased way. As a result, we were able to award hundreds more students funding than before as we're able to be more flexible, nimble, and intentional.