Editorial Calendar Import Question

[AB_PR]

My team's work involves tracking and acting on various publication editorial calendars. For example, if a publication is covering [topic x] in January, we like to be able to see that in a spreadsheet and act on it.

Currently we collect hundreds of these kits and enter them into Google Sheets separated by month tabs for a full year for each publication. My question is whether an Airtable interface or forms could be set up to make that entry a little easier? Plus maybe make for a more pleasant viewing / sorting experience? I don't have much experience with Airtable interfaces and I couldn't find a similar solution when I searched around.

Essential elements:
-Ability to enter editorial calendars which include month and associated topic, deadlines associated with each month, and publication name. Ideally also the ability to link publications with specific clients to indicate relevance. Additionally ideal to import editor and other relevant contact info and link it to the publication.

-Ability to sort list by relevant clients and then view topics in individual month views

-Nice-to-haves: ability to tack notes to individual topics (topic specific to a month and publication) that are then linked to that topic/pub so it's easy to see even if filtering for other clients. Similarly it would be nice to tack notes to publications in the same way.

I'm not asking anyone to do any work for me - just curious if this is feasible and if anyone has a starting point? I don't want to waste a ton of time researching if it isn't worthwhile.

Thanks!

[Pascal_Gallais-]

Hello,

This project does seem feasible. 

You would need first to design and create the database and then create an interface on top of this base whith different pages types depending on how you want do input and display information.

I think the first question you need to answer is what Airtable Plan you would need and how many users will have editors rights since it has an impact on licenses cost. Read only users can only imput new data through forms and cannot update data.

Of course a more precise answer would require spending time on deeply understanding your project

Best regards

Pascal

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Yeap, your requirements sound pretty doable!

Moving from Sheets to Airtable has been (in my experience) more painful than most people expect though.  They work fairly differently and so you'd probably need to implement a bunch of workflow changes or spend some time massaging the data so that the workflows work the same way one would expect in Sheets

Another potential concern is that, once we start structuring the data in Airtable, we start realizing that the data is pretty messy, which in turn prevents us from implementing the workflows.  Since Sheets is so freeform, it lets us get away with a lot of stuff that Airtable won't