New User- Question about basic setup

Hello ​@nhudson,

What you’re asking boils down to a schema question. It’s hard to say exactly how you should structure your base without more information about the data that you are trying to organize.

This is such a fundamental question that you’re probably better served referring to the airtable support documentation. https://support.airtable.com/docs/introduction-to-airtable-basics

If you would like one on one help feel free to send me a direct message and I’d be happy to set up a time to help you figure out how to handle the task at hand.

Indeed this is a schema question and intentionally considering what information is where and how it relates to other information. I’d go find a whiteboard haha.

Overall Airtable doesn’t use expressed primary keys (it has recordIDs that run in the background unless you want them expressed). When it comes to linking, you would link all the tables in the base together should the data intersect, but you can use lookup and rollup fields to move data across tables without linking them together directly. For example…

Say I have a location/address table, a services table, and an organization table. Org is linked to services, services is linked to location, but Org is not linked to location. You can use lookup fields to bring say a phone number from the location table to the service table, and then from the service table to the Org table, without linking them directly. 

As for reporting, that always depends on what kind of reporting you’re doing. Do you need some kind of pie charts that are automatically generated all the time for the CEO to sagely look at and nod, or do you just need to pull numbers occasionally. Regardless, Airtable is pretty flexible and adaptable, and you can rearchitect on the fly a bit 

Hey ​@nhudson, 

As mentioned before, the structure of your base depends on the reporting you need. You can start by linking tables, and Rollup fields. I think Rollup fields should work for you, especially since you've been using Excel.

Once you have a basic structure, you can try creating a report using Airtable’s Interface designer, or third-party tools like Noloco or Softr.

Honestly, linking tables in Airtable is actually much faster than it seems — especially if you already have some unique values in your Excel tabs (contact IDs, investor numbers, etc). You basically recreate the structure from Excel:

• one table for Contacts

• one table for Returns

• one for Budgets

• etc.

…and then link them together via the Link to another record field.

Where people usually get stuck (coming from spreadsheets) is thinking that they can calculate a subtotal inside a table and then reuse that subtotal in another table. Airtable allows that - but it quickly becomes a mess. If a tab has totals (sums) that are then used in other formulas, you’re much better off creating a separate table that stores only those calculated totals.

The key mental shift is this:

Excel = one big spreadsheet with rows/columns
Airtable = several tables of records with fixed structure, connected together like a small relational database.

Think of a basic star schema / snowflake schema - don’t go deep into theory, just google the term to see the structure visually. That’s roughly how Airtable wants you to organize your data.

So yes, it might look like “a lot of work” in the beginning, but once the relationships are in place, a lot of things that are manual / painful in Excel (lookups, rollups, aggregations, joins, etc.) become built-in and trivial in Airtable.

If the original Excel tabs are reasonably well-structured, the transfer is actually pretty smooth. If not - that’s where most of the effort will go.