Aug 10, 2020 07:44 AM
Hi, we have been using AT for the last couple of month and it is going very well on most of our projects but I’m stuck on the following. I would like to have a view where we can show all records with the same date. We produce a daily publication and it would be helpful to have a view where our sale people can add an advert booking for a specific date and page. It would also be good to have the same thing but for editorial notes. I wanted to upload a screen shot to help describe the problem but can’t as I’m a new user.
Aug 10, 2020 08:42 AM
I would group your records by date.
Aug 10, 2020 10:10 AM
Thank you ScottWorld, I have tried that but I’m after a view similar to the attached screenshot, we might need to use a block but I haven’t found one that will do what we are after. Perhaps an airtable to site might be the answer
Aug 10, 2020 10:41 AM
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking at in that screenshot. However, whenever you group your records by date in Airtable, any new records that you create within that group will automatically inherit the same exact date, and will stay within the same group.
Aug 11, 2020 02:28 PM
Hi Gavin,
I have done something similar by creating a view that has a filter ‘Where {date of advert} is today’. Of course, this will only give you the list of adverts for today, but you can use an Airtable automation/Zapier/Integromat to create a snapshot. For instance, my automation is triggered at midnight (since at that time the view will ‘receive’ ‘new’ records) and copies all relevant records to a new table (which is my task list for that day). As an alternative, you could also let people use the actual view itself (or create an e-mail that contains the list of adverts for the day, for that matter).
Now, the above is only interesting if you are talking about daily publication in the sense that the required list is also ‘published’ daily to your sales people and only viewed on that particular day. In all other cases, I assume the sales team would need an overview of all publication dates and issues. In that case, I agree with Scott. You could also consider using a calendar view. Using a block or Airtable-to-site, though possible, sounds to me like an unnecessarily complex approach.
I have to say, though, that your use case can be interpreted in several ways, so I have made some assumptions in my reply. If these suggestions are not suitable to your situation, it could be useful if you would elaborate on how the sales people actually do their work. What is the sequence of the steps taken? Are they approached by phone at any given time to promptly make an advert booking, or do they first collect all advert requests and have a fixed timeslot in which to disperse all adverts over several issues? Which information do they need to see to be able to match an advert with issue?
Aug 12, 2020 12:22 AM
Hi Aernout, thank you for your thorough reply, much appreciated. What I’m trying to do is have a view where we can add advert bookings and editorial notes for that day’s issue. At the moment, on the screen shot I supplied, we can change the date using the mini calendar, then on each day, we can add and show booking and notes specific to that day. None of the default views within AirTable allow us to do this in a user friendly way, perhaps AirTable isn’t the right product for achieving this. Our current screen is on a internal intranet using an access database but as I’ve been using AT for other parts of our business I thought we might be able to achieve a similar look with a new base for this. Regards Gavin
Aug 12, 2020 05:35 AM
Hi Gavin,
If the users want just about the same form as the one they are used to, I agree that Airtable may not provide the ideal GUI. On the other hand, very few software solutions will closely emulate the GUI of another platform.
Aug 12, 2020 05:58 AM
Thanks, it’s a shame as AT is a very usable database. It would be good if they offered a better facility to view records by a date in a more use friendly way or even if there was a block that could do it. As you say, it might be a case of educating our users in a different format within AT