Create an employee Starters, Movers & Leavers base in Airtable

[Shaun_Parfett]

Hi all. I am trying to get my head around creating a base for employee Starters, Movers & Leavers listings at my employer as a way to get Airtable into the business. After a couple of years of trying to get my boss to say yes, he finally agreed to my implementing a trial, so it’s important that I get this right!

The current situation is that an Excel spreadsheet is prepared by HR and it consists of a single sheet with disparate information (columns) contained on it. I have attached an anonymised screenshot of part of a mock-up of it herewith.

I have created a base with a table that contains all the spreadsheet fields and then created Views for each section of the spreadsheet, which just show the relevant fields (unused fields are hidden). I have then created input forms based on the configuration of each view - I had to create an Entry Type dropdown single select field to identify where each entry should go, e.g., the New Starters entry type goes into the New Starters view in the table by using a filter on the Entry Type field. I believe that this is the recommended structure, as opposed to creating separate tables for each section of the spreadsheet, but I may be wrong?

What HR are currently doing, is sending this spreadsheet to IT (and other Business Support depts) weekly, who then have to create tickets in the Helpdesk to record the staff events, and gives them an idea of future hardware, etc., requirements. Some items are non-actionable by IT as they are just informative in nature.

I need to produce a similar (but hopefully far better) report or base view that can be viewed by all Business Support depts. This is what I am struggling with. How do I create something that incorporates the disparate fields and will not be cumbersome and almost as illegible as the current spreadsheet. I have the entry of the data sorted by using the forms I created, but I need well designed output and this is where I have run into a mental brick wall. Any suggestions and/or assistance would be greatly (massively) appreciated! A screenshot of part of my base follows.

Many thanks in advance.
Shaun

[Mohamed_Swella1]

Hi @Shaun_Parfett ,

Welcome to Airtable Community!

I think the best way to get the data to display is make another view specifically for this purpose. In this view you will use the Group By option to have the records of the same category grouped.

Now the problem will come with the fields that you do not need for each category, this has no solution other than showing all the relevant fields you need and the ones that aren’t relevant to this record will simply be empty.

BR,
Mo

[Shaun_Parfett]

Hi Mo

Many thanks for your input. I am going to leave the question open for a while longer but I can’t see any other way of doing this other than your solution. I guess this is where Airtable falls short in a corporate environment. Everything works very well until you have to find a way to report on your data - inputting data is easy and elegant using forms but output not so much so. Hopefully this will be addressed soon.

Cheers
Shaun