Airtable 101

Author Automations Airtable 101 === ​[00:00:00] Chelle Honiker: Airtable is one of those apps that when used right. Is an absolute game changer for your business. I have been using Airtable for many years and it powers tons and tons of things. It can be very overwhelming. So in this video, what I'd like to do is just give you the basics for how you can set it up to manage and power your author business. I use this as what we call our source of truth for a lot of the workflows that I build. So setting this up. Right the first time. We'll let you get started right outta the gate, but then we'll also, as we build more workflows, give you a strong. Feature set and a strong base to do some amazing things. For example, if you go into the tools here and you look at the extension, you've got just a ton of different things that you can do here, org charts and pivot tables and all that. SendGrid. There's just a myriad of things that you [00:01:00] can do with Airtable, but most people just need some basics. So let me give you a breakdown of what Airtable is to start with. If you think of Airtable, like Google Sheets on steroids, that's probably your best bet just to wrap your brain around it as a concept. So you have data and automations and interfaces and forms. I'm gonna go over all of those in depth, but we're gonna start with data and what the data actually looks like. So across the top here, you've got tables. And the whole thing is rolled up into a base. So in terms of structure, you've got base and then you've got tables, and then you've got data and rows inside those tables. So it's. Really similar to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel in the sense that these are sheets. Normally you would see in a, Excel spreadsheet or in a Google sheet, you would see tabs down along the bottom. It's pretty much the same thing, except with [00:02:00] these, they're just more powerful. You also have a really nice visual layout of what everything is with everything that's in your base here. That can get a little bit tricky because when you delete something, you're deleting it everywhere, and that gets a little bit tricky and I'll explain that as we go along. But it's important to note that along with these. Tabs across the top here, which are all of your tables. Inside that you can create what are called views, and so that can sometimes trip folks up because even though you don't see records in there, sometimes there's filters turned on. Or groupings turned on and you can't really see everything. It's the records are there. And so you've got from a structure perspective, your base, then your tables, then your data rows, and then you've got views so you can look at them. So let's look at this. Base that I've [00:03:00] created that you can copy and I'll drop the link in the show notes here so you can see exactly how to do that. What you do basically is you open it up and you paste this link in, and then from here you can put in the password. The password is author automations, very simple author automations, and then it will prompt you if you don't have. If you don't have an Airtable account, it will prompt you to create an Airtable account, but if you. Do have an Airtable account. It'll just say, do you want to copy this base? So you'll see it open up here, and then once it's opened up, you can save this into your own. Please rename it, click on copy base, copy it into your own. Last pass is getting aggressive. Copy. Copy the base. Then copy it into your own workflow and change the name of it. That gets really confusing later on when you're going [00:04:00] through and setting up some of the workflows, because the workflows default to Chelle's base and it will. You will create a base in your own setup that will be called Shell's Base. So you'll have two, you'll see mine, and then you'll have yours. So if you're not careful, you'll be saving data into the copy in your instance with my name. So be sure you go right up here after you copy it right up here to this dropdown. And click here and you can rename it right here. And rename it to yours, right? So once you've got it saved, then you will see this base right here. All right, so let's go through what each of these fields are and each of these records and rows. So you've got your basic table here. I've named this project. And then the second table here is tasks, and these tasks can roll up into projects. So from a project management perspective, a [00:05:00] project is anything that has a start and end date or something that you're working on continuously. So for my example right here, I've got my book Curses and. I'm working on the book, and so in my project here I have a status and I have some tasks which come from the tasks table. I'll show you that in a second. I've attached my cover photo, my PDF of my final draft, my Dropbox link, where everything lives for my images. I have selected what, a series it belongs to. I've got the epub, I've got the print interior. That's my basics. Now if I want, and I can see them, if I open up the record, I see all of it here. But if I scroll to the right here, I can see all of these fields. So with these fields, I've got a bunch of different options. I have if you see the little a next to that's a single line text. And then I've also got here [00:06:00] a dropdown menu, which is a status. We'll come back to tasks in a second. Then I've got an image, and this is just an attachment file. So if I wanted to create a new one, a new field, I could come all the way to the end here and click on this plus sign. And these are all the different fields that I have available to me. I can link to another record. I can create just a single line text. I can create a paragraph. This is good for blurbs. I can do an attachment that's a PDF, or an image, or any other kind of file that I want. I can create a checkbox file, or a checkbox field. That's particularly helpful when we're getting into workflows and things are done or not done, or you're ready to schedule things. You can have a multiple select where I have that here, where in my multiple select field I have my actually I'm gonna rename this two series and you can see how easy it is to rename this. So this is the series name. So I have my Port Tempest and my jamon pack. If I had [00:07:00] other series, I could just hit the plus sign and I could continue on. And you can see also that I can color code them. So if Jamon pack, I wanted to have in red. For example, I could do that and save it, and then when I changed it, it would be in red. So it's just little visual cues that you can use to set yourself up early and have it available. You know throughout, once you set it, you can forget it. So again, this is an attachment field and this is just an epub. So I can put in files, or I can turn this on inversions. So if I wanted to compare and contrast, those are on paid, ver paid plans. I'm showing you everything that's possible just on a free plan. So then I've got my print interior, and again, I can add to this. So you can take the basics that I've given you and let's say later on you wanted to, have your average rating. and then when we get into some of these. Other workflows. You'll also [00:08:00] see that you can create formulas and rollups and counts and lookups. Created times, modified times. You can auto number things, you can create barcodes and you can create buttons. All of these we will use right in different formats and places. I use them a lot for workflows. You won't need to know what the formulas are, but they're there and you can play with them and see. Okay, so let's talk about the kind of. Field that pulls data from other places. And again, we're trying to keep it pretty simple, but I've got a tasks list here. And remember I said you have different kinds of views. The basic view is a grid view. It just looks like a table. But the other kinds of views, you can use a Kanban board and this, if you're familiar with Trello or Asana or Basecamp, you can drag things through statuses here. So you can start with a bunch of tasks that are in your well that you have no due [00:09:00] date for. You don't have any progress attached to 'em. They're just waiting to be done. And then you could create a task here, like right chapter three. And then you can put in any notes. This is also where. I've set it up so that you can assign things to people. So if I wanted to assign it to myself, I could put my name in there, and then you can decide what status you want for this. So if it's a to-do that you need to work on or in progress or done. Now you can also change all of these statuses. So if you were working, for example, with editors or if you were working with, proofreaders or designers or whatever. You can change these statuses to say with, Nicole for edits or with grace for design. You can change these to match whatever you want. You don't have to use them as they are out of the box. Then if you have something that you want as an attachment, you [00:10:00] can drop it there. And then here's where you're going to attach it to a project. So when I click on add project, it goes back to this projects list and it looks for the projects that I've created. And in this particular case, the only one I've got there is curses and currents. So it attaches to this project. Now you'll notice there's no save button, and that's because. When you exit out of it, it automatically saves. So as you're working through Airtable, you'll notice that there's some help along the way. So now if I'm ready to work on this, because I'm in the Kanban view here, I can drag it from Uncategorized over to do, and then it's on my game board. Now I can always go back to the grid view and I can see it. And now you can see that I've got right chapter three is in the status of. To do now in here, because I'm looking at this list, it's just in [00:11:00] the, nebulous way that I've added it. So if I add another right chapter four here it just goes in to, the way that I do it now up here, I can do a bunch of things. I can filter. So I can filter it and I can create a condition that says when the status is to do, then I see it. Now, this is where, again, people get a little bit hung up because I filtered this. That doesn't mean that other task is not in this. Table. It is in this table. I've just filtered it so that I'm just looking at things that are just in the to-do, so I can go over here and rename this view to say all tasks to do. So that I know what this filter is at a glance over here, but you'll notice if I go back over to Kanban because I haven't filtered it, I see both [00:12:00] tasks there so I can go in and look at things and see. The entirety of a project or things that I have to do. You could also, if you had different assignee in here, you could create one that has it. Everything that's assigned Nicole, everything that's assigned to Grace. You can also group things. So I'm gonna delete that filter and I'm gonna come back up here and I'm gonna say I want to see everything, but I want to group it by the status and then it changes it so that this is. There is no status on here. So I can see that it's there. And then I've got everything grouped by status. So everything that's in the to-do status is here, and then everything in progress is here. So views are really powerful ways for you to slice and dice your data, and you can see all the things in, any way that you want. the thing to remember is that grouping puts them everything in the same road. You can also use a grouping and a filter. So if I wanted to filter out the status [00:13:00] is not deferred for example, or the status is not to do, I can see just everything in progress and everything that's empty. So in this status, I can also do where status is not empty or is empty. Those are some nice filter options there. You can also sort things you could, take these filters off and then you can take off the groupings. And then you can sort it. So let's say I wanted to sort it by the status, right? It's gonna sort it now for order by the status. I can also right click on these and I can, sort from here. I can filter by here, group here. There's all kinds of things, right? Clicking does a lot of powerful stuff. So that's the concept of bases, projects bases, tables, and then data within there. And then I've got, now when I come back over to my projects, you'll [00:14:00] see. That I have multiple tasks because this is now linked to this task. So if I make this is the sizing, the row height right here. So if I make this extra tall, you'll see now that I have two tasks in here. Now I can't outright edit this. I can't type in here, but I can click on the plus sign here and I can look and see if there's any unassigned tasks. And there's chap, right chapter four, so I can just quickly reference that. So you can go through and you can cross populate, your tasks. And now if I go back over to tasks, you'll see that it's attached to this project. So it's a back and forth to keep it straight. And again, the reason why these are broken out is so that they. Are cross-referenced in different places. So that's the projects, that's the tasks. The next table that I have for you is the social planner table and the social planner table. Very tightly aligns with the workflows that I'll show you in the [00:15:00] next video, but it has all the data that you need in here for all the different purposes. So you've got the campaign topic titles and the status and the objective. A lot of these things are gonna be filled in by the workflow, so you don't need to hang out or figure out what that is yet. We'll get to that in the next phase, but. The workflows can write, read the data in Airtable, and then write back to Airtable, which is really fabulous. Some of the other tables that I've got for you. I created just a basic financial table. It really is just data in and data out. I created a table for you for brand assets. This is where you can put your videos. This is where you can put your logos. So you've got one place you can reference Dropbox. So for example, I could add here and put Dropbox link or Google. Links. I always do this. You've gotta decide what table you want. So this one is going to be a URL. [00:16:00] Field, and I'm gonna call this Dropbox link to logo. So I'm not gonna, actually, I'm gonna save a picture of it in here so that I can see it. But then I'm also gonna link to Dropbox so that I'm not using up and going over my free plan on Dropbox. Airtable charges you if you have images or pictures or videos in here. I'm on the paid plan, so I can't exactly tell you what those limitations are, but I do know that there are limitations. So if you wanna stay with the free Airtable plan, then you don't wanna put a bunch of attachments and images and files in here, which you wanna do is link them. And then the table that I've got in here is to watch your ad campaigns. And I just put this. To, stick a pin in it. 'cause we do have some more workflows that will go get your information. This is just a basic one. But this will give you the basics of Airtable when it comes to bases, tables, data, rows and [00:17:00] views.