[SOLVED] Add report builder or other reporting tools

[Kai_Harris]

Are there plans to add reporting or data analysis functionality to Airtable? Currently it appears the only way to analyze the data is to either use filters or to export to CSV and use a 3rd party tool. Filters work okay for some basic data analysis but don’t work for cross-table reports. And CSV doesn’t work across tables.

My use case is tracking service delivery, light case management. I need to be able to pull regular reports with SQL type logic that pulls together linked tables and applies logic and formulas to them.

I can get some of this from filters, but I’d like to save the reports so I don’t have to recreate them each time. Saving a different view for each filter would create a massive number of views - not a very good solution. For example, one field is client age. I need to report how many clients fall into 5 different age categories. So in order to save this, I’d need to create a different view for each age category - 5 different views just for that data element.

[Caryn_Larrinaga]

Would love to see this feature also! Our leadership would like to see high-level numbers in real time at a glance, so a reporting dashboard would be extremely helpful.

[Brad_Kramer]

Agree with reporting. We need to publish a word/PDF to outside sources. I really can’t go forward with this product unless we address this issue

[Joerg_von_Loebe]

Reports and graphs would make this app solid.

[Colin_Rathbun]

Still no update? Airtable, I think we’re due an update. thanks.

[Katherine_Duh]

Hi Colin, we’re currently in the middle of beta testing our grouped records feature, which allows you to group together records based on one or more fields of your choosing. (This is essentially what the Salesforce report builder looks like.) Suppose you have a sales pipeline in Airtable.

If you used the group records feature, you can group by which sales opportunities closed successfully, by lead type, or any number of other criteria (depending on what your table looks like).

Notice that when the records are grouped, the summary bar shows separate summaries for each of the groups and sub-groups. You can pick from a variety of different possible summary functions (e.g. median, range, standard deviation) depending on the type of field. Pretty neat!

If you would like Airtable to have more/different reporting functions, such as visual reporting graphing, or customizable dashboards etc., we absolutely welcome more detailed feedback on particular types of reporting features you’d like to see, and why these particular features would be useful for your use case specifically. The category of “reporting tools” is pretty massive, and it’s extremely useful for us to have a repository of detailed user stories when we want to decide how to proceed with developing features, instead of us just guessing what our users might want. The first post in this thread is a good example of the kind of feedback that can help us develop a quality product.

[Heidi_van_Schai]

This looks like a feature that is already available to me, and I’ve already been using. However, now that I’m trying to enhance my database from a simple flat table to two related tables, I seem to be losing the ability to group by all fields. I can group by fields within the open table, including the field that links to the other table. However, I cannot choose fields within the other table to group by.

My two tables are Issues and Tasks. However, I have a third tier above that, as a Category field (it could just as well be a separate table, but the single select field type suffices easily). So my hierarchy of one-to-many relationships is: Categories < Issues < Tasks. The old structure was Categories < Tasks.

Now, when it was a flat single table structure, I was able to group by Category. Now I have the ability to group by Issue. It is ugly, as all I can see is the ID number until I click to expand. But I have lost the ability to group by Category.

Essentially, we are not being offered full relational database functionality. I understand this is a work in progress, so I’m waiting patiently.

[Tim_Wilson]

One possible solution would be to include the fields from the other tables as “Lookup” field values so they’re available for grouping. You can simply hide the looked up field in your table so you don’t see it.

[Heidi_van_Schai]

Genius. That seems to work. So the full relational database functionality is there, it’s just a matter of finding the right features to express it. I’m glad to see I can use this technique for report construction too.

[Lauren_Clack]

The grouping is great for specific views, but I think I would still like some way to have summarized reports. For instance, I have a projects table that links to several other tables and when the status changes to “Complete” it would be nice to have a summary available that shows things like: length of project (I have a start date, but pull end date from the activity history of when the status changed to complete), as well as materials used, how much of the materials were used, corresponding accessories, etc that I do have fields for but a lot of them I don’t want “shown” but to be pulled into a report at the end would still be useful. Right now I’m having a hard time keeping historical data of resources used and still show them as available on the resources table. But all that is information in the “activities history” when you pull up a record detail page. But do I really want to scroll up and see everything separated out that way? A summary report where we can control layout would solve for that.

[Stephanie_Avile]

The new group feature is great and very useful but I agree with Lauren here. I’d love to see a more robust reporting feature that would ideally track specific changes in the tables.