Why Airtable?

What is Airtable used for and why use Airtable? There are a few key reasons for Airtable's blowout success.
Joey Alfano
Joey Alfano
|
Co-Founder of Superchart
April 7, 2023
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Airtable is a powerful cloud-based database platform that makes it easy to organize, store and collaborate on data. It combines the features of a traditional spreadsheet with the power of a database, allowing users to quickly create sophisticated databases without any coding knowledge. With Airtable, users can easily create tables of information, add fields and columns for customizing their data structure, set up relationships between different pieces of data, and share results with colleagues or customers in real time.

Airtable is used by a wide variety of organizations, ranging from individuals and small businesses to large corporations and governments. For instance, some of the world's leading companies like Shopify, Levis, West Elm, Autodesk, Intuit, and Uber all use Airtable to organize their data. It is also being used in hospitals, universities, non-profits, and other organizations worldwide.

Airtable is also used in a wide variety of business and organizational roles and functions. Companies use Airtable to store customer data, manage tasks and track progress on projects. Non-profits also use Airtable to manage their databases and keep track of donations. Hospitals use it to organize patient information and manage complex medical operations. Universities use Airtable to store student records, course details, and track the progress of research projects. The possibilities are almost endless!

Airtable has taken a chunk of the massive quantities of processes and problems solved by Excel, and put them online in a collaborative, secure, and widely accessible format. There are a plethora of reasons why Airtable has become so popular, especially for the business user. Here, we'll break down three reasons Airtable has been so successful:

1) The Familiarity of Airtable

The best part about Airtable is that it is incredibly easy to use. It has a user-friendly interface that allows users to drag and drop data into the tables quickly and easily. Check out our Airtable guide for beginners if you're unfamiliar with the basic functionality.

It's close enough to Excel or Google Sheets to be very easy to understand for almost any business user. It makes operations traditionally discussed at a database level (like inner and outer joins, functions, data types, etc.) easy enough for any user via familiar Excel functions (like 'lookups', data validation, formatting, etc.). The platform also offers powerful automation capabilities, allowing users to automate processes like data aggregation, reporting, and collaboration, without needing in-depth knowledge. Airtable also integrates with hundreds of other services and applications, so users can access their data from anywhere.

2) The Security of Airtable

Data security is always a top priority for businesses, which is why Airtable offers advanced security features to keep your data safe. It has robust encryption protocols in place to protect user information and privacy, and it also offers two-factor authentication to further secure user accounts. Airtable also allows users to control who has access to their data, making sure that only authorized personnel can view and edit the information.

As with any internal software, security relies mostly on password protection from end-users. When compared to other database types, you would probably conclude that Airtable is relatively insecure; lots of database users with edit access for almost any entry and trigger lots of subsequent system events... But when you compare Airtable to Excel, where users are generally sharing different versions of files with very little data integrity, Airtable is a vastly-improved solution.

3) The Customer and Technical Support of Airtable

Airtable doesn't just offer powerful features; it also provides extensive customer support. With its easy-to-use user guide and help center, users can find the answers to their questions quickly. The platform also has a dedicated team of customer support specialists who are available 24/7 to offer assistance. With Airtable, users have someone to contact in reference to managing their data.

In Conclusion

Airtable has found massive success by building a relatable, cloud based database that any business user can configure and utilized. Because it is so flexible, it's used for a variety of use cases across a plethora of organizations types; teams small to large, startup to enterprise, profit to non-profit, all use Airtable to help run their organization.

If you want to include Airtable visualizations or charts on Google Sheets on your website, data story, or ad hoc analysis, be sure to try Superchart for free.

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