Organizing Data - By Year?

[K_Sandum]

Hello - New to airtable and community. Using this to track marketing projects and corresponding reach numbers. (Also man other fields such as contact, etc etc)

I have a base created but am questioning now how I organized the fields

Should I have a unique base per year?
Or should I have projects indexed by year in one base. (Using filters to calculate numbers per year)

Thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @K_Sandum - I think it depends upon your use case, but as a rule of thumb I would tend to not have a base per year, but for each record to have a year field and then create views filtering by year if you want to focus on a specific set of records. This also helps if you want to report across years or compare years (but you may not need to do this of course).

JB

[Bill_French]

K_Sandum:

Should I have a unique base per year?

Given that Airtable has a relatively low operating ceiling in terms of table size, the question of scale should be addressed before any storage approach is considered.

[Matthew_Moran]

I manage/design the airtable setup for a PR & Marketing company. I would, in general, counsel against a base by year situation. They track extensive metrics for the marketing programs by month, year, marketing representative, client, and the type of media hit (ranked).

In order to get the reporting we want, however, I’ve setup integration with Google Sheets - and a Google script runs a couple times a day to pull any new data and update their reports.

Airtable itself is simply too limited in its presentation and reporting. This provides a far more robust mechanism for looking at numbers. Plus, from a couple airtable views, I can pull just the data needed for the various reports.

[Bill_French]

Matthew_Moran:

Airtable itself is simply too limited in its presentation and reporting.

Agree 100%.

Often, organizations (and information system creators) conclude that Airtable is ideal and therefore, should be fit for almost every IT challenge.

Airtable is indeed a wonderful user-facing tool that provides an elegant experience in all things information. But there are many things it cannot do nor should we try to force it to be more than it can be.

Matthew_Moran:

integration with Google Sheets - and a Google script

Yep - it’s [a] perfect combination for even very extensive reporting tasks.

[K_Sandum]

Eventually I would like to get there. Linking to sheets or excel for reporting etc.

[Matthew_Moran]

This is where we are going with my client. I pull a similar type of dataset as your linked article shows and generate both visual charts and a couple internal and external sheets.

We are also looking to create emails with data - my client currently shares certain items using the “Send Record” feature. This, of course, results in numerous clients requesting access to AT because the link is embedded in the email.

I love AT for its ease/speed of setup. I find a number of things very frustrating or strange in their absence.

[K_Sandum]

Thank you everyone!! I will use one base.

[Matthew_Moran]

Start with some R&D (ripoff and duplicate) and then program in CP (cut & paste). :winking_face:

There are some decent examples online - I’ll be publishing something shortly as well.

[K_Sandum]

Any information on how you do this would be helpful. Does it work both ways? (Updating airtable updates sheets?) I actually prefer the idea of data entry in airtable (Using forms) but need data for visual reporting. The “blocks” look a little limited.