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Lindsay_Kirsch
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Hello,

I am creating a content calendar.

In table 1, I would like to see a calendar view of all scheduled tasks.

The scheduled tasks are each in their own tables (blogs, newsletters, socials, etc.)

How do I take the task name, type, and publish date from the individual tables and pull them into one calendar view?

1 Reply 1

Hi @Lindsay_Kirsch,

Ultimately, calendaring tasks together will be much easier with an adjustment to your base's structure. Instead of having one table per content type, you should consider having a single table of "tasks" with views filtered for each content type. This way, you will be able to create a calendar view for all tasks across all content types.

It may seem daunting to redo a lot of the work but there are many reasons why this is a better approach when it comes to base design.

  • Automations will be far easier to create and maintain
  • Syncing to other bases will be easier/cleaner
  • Finding things and organizing your team's work in your base will be easier
  • The chance of duplicating data across tables will be less
  • Potential custom work will be less expensive and less often necessary
  • Form links and shared view links will be easier to distribute
  • etc etc

Plus, if you ever want to use a timeline view's hidden power for resource capacity planning, you'll need to switch to this structure. Airtable really is designed for structuring your base like a database and not like Excel.

In short, there are a few best practices when it comes to designing an Airtable base to get the most out of using Airtable (such as grouping like-data under a single table and slicing/dicing with views). You can choose to ignore them but you'll very likely continue to run into complexity down the road for the sake of what seems like a better UX/UI at first but makes the best features of Airtable much harder to achieve.

Hope that helps!
-Stephen