Facilitating Airtable Training

[Tom_R]

Hi all!

I’m the main “go-to” person in our team of 10 or so for Airtable. The team has requested that I do an Airtable 101 session.

Everyone’s roles are diverse, and they interact with our Airtable system (CRM) differently. No one has a data background; we’re made up of marketers, general admin officers, and BDM’s.

Has anyone facilitated an Airtable 101/basics session? What worked? What didn’t work? What did the general person understand and what didn’t they understand? Are there any great analogies out there to explain Airtable’s architecture? (e.g. relational database in Layman’s terms)

I know this is subjective, and I’m aware of the rich how-to content that Airtable has published, but any advice on any actual sessions people ran and the feedback from those sessions would be great!

Thanks.

[Alex_Wolfe]

I thought the start of this recent Airtable webinar had some good slides and explanations of the basic structure of Airtable:

https://app.livestorm.co/airtable/airtable-for-project-management/live?s=ad8370f5-0c28-4a8f-b48c-a53...

In case it’s helpful!

[bdelanghe]

Hi :wave: @Tom_R,

I found a few things helpful:

1. Talk about ‘things’ before even going into relational data. This is surprisingly hard because most people who have experience with excel or google sheets are used to making reports.

2. Make simple tables ‘only names’

3. Start adding relations fun one is pets and owners. You can start with

   • 1 owner : 1 pet
   • 1 owner : Many pets
   • Many Owners : Many Pets

4. Then link the owners table to itself for who is a relationship (monogamy optional)

5. Then create a multi-select in pets for what food they eat (now you can add a lookup to owners)

6. Convert the food type to a table and then do a rollup count for how many pets eat individual food.

In short create something useless. It helps to break peoples assumptions. I’d then let others ask questions and create things on the fly. If you start them on the right track they’ll be set up to ask smart questions later.

Ps. Decide what you are not going to go over. Adding too much can easily overwhelm people and make them take away less than if you omitted it.