AI Notes Group Lesson - Airtable

tags:: Airtable #source/lecture
people:: Michael Ramzy

How he explains Airtable

Let's start from scratch and build a list of speakers.

3 minutes about the difference between short and long text.
Beauty is the different types of fields.
ATtachment is a fancy field.

"I'm spending a bit more time on this (field types) because it's really the core and you have to understand it well."

link to another record—that's the beauty

MW: This must be much more practical for people to follow. He's just listing all the types and possibilities like Lukas was doing. We need a project to anchor around and return to the design over and over.

MW: Okay he is actually talking about the speakers all the time. Showing the types of columns is a little bit useful to show off.

MW: I would start off by making a diagram.

MW: I would start with a big Why. Something like: we can have everything in our business organized. And organized well. Excel can be a mess because it's too easy to change things around all the time. If you're not structured you don't have a business.

22 minutes to make two tables and one link

Building Interfaces

"Now what if I wanted to make an interface?"

MW: Missing the why-start again

Share by email or link.

Free version only has 2-3 editors available to you.

Michael: automations "I'm starting to play around with it"

He's building an emergency travel kit. Pictures are very useful. IF it's done it's done. You can do it from your phone too.

I think he's going a bit too quick into the filters

Airtable vs. Notion

Airtable limits you with some things until you get the Pro. It's a bit limited on that.

What I love is integration between data. Notion has it too.

The interfaces I love.

Automation can take this to the next level.

MW: I think just as in AI people miss what they can use it for.

Interfaces make this really feel like an app. Though seems like very limited ways to edit. But really cool for building apps for internal small teams.

Table Joins

Airtable does support Table Joins in some kind of extension.

MW: Interesting, this is the second person who has experience working with relational databases and likes that structure.

The "Base Schema" shows the database relation visualized. She calls this "you see the table joins. you see which tables haven't been joined yet—so that means what data isn't going to talk to each other. eg., address table, if you don't know how to pull data from it, here you can see if it's not linked. for power users if you wanna see this is the place to look. If you don't link properly you can get bad data. I think that deserves a whole other session. This is an easy way to see if something's wrong."

ended the lecture at 58 minutes

Metrics are helpful and built-in to interfaces. They have charts, that's nice.