Hey all, I manage a makerspace at a college and I’ve been using Airtable for about a year. It has really helped me organize the makerspace operations–especially keeping track of which users have completed training on the various equipment we have. My question today is about overall base design. I currently have one table that has user information: name, email, etc. and three columns for each piece of equipment: Date training completed, a link to the staff that gave the training, and a formula that shows whether the training has expired or not. We currently have 14 or 15 trainings, and the table is getting difficult to read. It just occurred to me to create another table for the trainings (or each of the trainings) and then link those to the “User information” table. This was one of my first bases and I pulled it in from a spreadsheet, so it behaves much more like a spreadsheet and less like a database.
Table Design Question
+13Hi Noah,
One way to do this would be to split this up into three tables: People, Equipment, and Trainings. Then you can log trainings that link to the people and equipment involved in each training. See this example:
@Julian_E_Post Thanks for the quick reply. I was thinking something similar to what you posted, but I’m conceptualizing the Equipment table as referring to the training module, rather than the actual equipment and the Trainings table as instances of that training (ie the date the training was given to the people). Maybe that makes the whole Equipment table redundant, though.
Here’s a link to a mockup of my current base:
I do like the ability I have to quickly see on one page if someone has an authorization, but I’m sure there’s a more efficient way to organize this.
+13@Julian_E_Post Thanks for the quick reply. I was thinking something similar to what you posted, but I’m conceptualizing the Equipment table as referring to the training module, rather than the actual equipment and the Trainings table as instances of that training (ie the date the training was given to the people). Maybe that makes the whole Equipment table redundant, though.
Here’s a link to a mockup of my current base:
I do like the ability I have to quickly see on one page if someone has an authorization, but I’m sure there’s a more efficient way to organize this.
The beauty of Airtable is that we all do things differently, and here we have the freedom to do so. If I understand what you’re saying, are you trying to consolidate the equipment and trainings tables into one?
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