Reporting: should I do this with Pivot or Page block

[Wouter]

I have a table with costs with these fields:
Date / Descr / Category (4 options) / Price / VAT / Quarter (calculated based on date)

How would I get this report table as output in Airtable for Q1:
Category / Price (sum per category) / VAT (sum per category)
And and the bottom a row with the sums.

I tried:

• Pivot doesn’t allow me to have multiple fields as columns (Price ánd VAT)
• With a new filtered view it’s kindof possible by grouping by category (and collapsing them so the records are not visible) and hiding some fields. The sums are at the bottom. But this is not very presentable.

Thanks!

[Matthew_Moran]

To say that Airtable reporting is limited would be a grotesque understatement.

You might look at this:

Medium – 24 Sep 19

You too can make dashboards: How to visualise your Airtable data in Google...

We’ve written a guide on how you can combine two free tools to centralise and visualise your data.

Reading time: 7 min read

Taking this as a basis, I created a series of formatted pivot tables and presentation tools that auto-update 4 times a day for my client.

Process:

• Create a view with the data
• Write a Google script that extracts the data and schedule that script to run 4 times a day
• The script includes updating pivot tables based on the data - Google Sheet’s has more options for multiple column/row groupings.
• The script takes pivot table data and updates a couple other sheets specific to (and shared with) my client’s clients and sends out email updates.

This took a bit to setup - but once in place was a significantly more robust reporting solution for a number of reasons.

[Matthew_Moran]

It should be noted: I am playing with Google Data Studio - but for now just use sheets natively. Google Data Studio was an extra/unnecessary step and seemed only able to refresh data every 12 hours. I haven’t played with it enough to know whether that can be modified.

[Wouter]

Thanks Matthew for the link and info! Currently just experimenting with Airtable, saved the link in case I’m gonna need it. I already had the feeling that reporting was not really Airtables thing.