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What’s Airtable?
Airtable is one of these new tools trying to challenge established softwares that everyone knows and uses but nobody likes. While some crazy people are trying to fight PowerPoint, they are trying to do the same with Excel. We could say it’s a spreadsheets tool on steroids because it’s much more powerful while still being super fun to use.
The first experience with Airtable can be a bit disorientating because you must accept to change your old habits.
The big Aha! moment is when you understand that Airtable operates much more like a database than all other spreadsheets tools you already know. This means what you create are real records that you can view/filter/etc. You can obviously connect all those records together — like you would in a relational database — and when you get that, sky is the limit.
What’s awesome is that you can add many different field types to a record: number, text, date, attachment, checkbox, single multiple select, people, rating, barcode, etc. It’s super straightforward and you end up doing much more advanced tables in one day of Airtable than in one lifetime of Excel.
Different views for your data
In the following slides you’ll see different views of the same database. You can choose to show all the tables of your database, a single view, a form view, a calendar view, a gallery view, a Kanban view, etc. This is pretty cool but also super useful. You can imagine creating a presentation where you ask to fill in a form (built with Airtable) and then show the results in a beautiful table.
Now you can imagine how handy this tool can be when you combine it with Ludus: interactive spreadsheets in interactives slides. It will always be up to date, easy to share, and make collaboration joyful instead of painful. To embed a table in Ludus, you just need to copy and paste the URL of the view of your choice.
Airtable is the next-generation spreadsheets tool, don’t wait too long before learning it.
When you start using Airtable on a regular basis, you can really feel that it’s the future. There is no way you could go back using Microsoft Excel after that. You just need this little effort at the very beginning to change your old habits but then you’ll realize you can become much more efficient and creative with that tool. At the end of the day, you’re just happy to use it and that’s a very inspiring goal for us at Ludus.
Because it’s web-based, you can integrate it with a lot of other tools, not just Ludus :) You can do advanced stuff like monitoring your Facebook ads, managing your people, organizing your planning, etc.
They also have very good guides based on simple examples, which should facilitate your onboarding. Don’t take this article as the definitive list of what you can do with Airtable because we just gave you a glimpse of what’s possible. It’s a very dense tool to learn and the possibilities are countless.
Start embedding Airtable spreadsheets in your slides now and impress your audience during your next presentation. And when you’re done, don’t hesitate to share the result with us :)