I want to use airtable so bad to solve problems, but I’m struggling to justify the pro plan when I can’t just simply use summary values in a formula or be able to have a column of totals to then auto sort.
Here I am every couple months trying to reverse engineer this crazy multiple table, linked records (which I can’t even auto add, I have to manually enter for new records), rollups, with formulas on top of that… and each time I have a variation in the problem I’m trying to solve, it means cracking open a new can of worms to get it done, often spending hours doing something that google sheets can do in seconds.
If I hear one more person say “It’s not a spreadsheet, it’s a relational database” again …
or if someone casually says that zappier can fix your problem without mentioning the high monthly cost and added work of integrating it all together with some other form software …
Let’s take Airtable to the next level and address so many people’s issues by allowing a table to act like a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to break the database when I could easily select “add new table” → “spreadsheet.” Then I can just add formulas and reference cells from other parts of the database. Then I could quickly whip up the charts I’m trying to create. No manual entry for linking tables, no insane workarounds to get an auto sorted column of totals. Sometimes I accomplish these goals and don’t even know how I did it because there were so many steps across 6 hours of trial and error and watching tutorials.
I want airtable to succeed, I want to justify the high payment each month, but we have to ditch this “it’s a relational database” limitation the community has right now that is pushing away so many beginners that are getting overwhelmed. JUST ADD A TABLE THAT CAN ACT AS A BASIC SPREADSHEET AND REFERENCE DATA ELSEWHERE SO I DON’T HAVE TO KEEP LEAVING AIRTABLE TO SOLVE BASIC PROBLEMS.