[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.

[Paul_Clark]

I went to the forums looking for help with reporting. Was surprised to find there is no reporting tools. Can I use any third party integrations for reporting?

[Ben_Orozco]

I would love Customized Reports like: charts, graphs, pivot tables, etc

[Katherine_Duh]

For those of you in this thread who’ve requested charts/graphs, I’m happy to inform you that we’re rolling out a beta for charts! You can sign up here. Please note that paid users get priority access to beta features.

[Robbie_Best]

Airtable is one of the most useful and beautiful apps I have seen in a long time. I use it for my personal items. I showed to my boss and some co-workers and they loved it. They wanted to put the entire sales team on it and our client relations department on it for various reasons but there is a huge lacking of reports. Don’t get me wrong the report you see on the screen is beautiful. What I mean are formatted reports we can print.

In Airtable the only 2 options I see are the print button which does print some sort of basic table print but there are little to no options. If I have a field with a large chunk of text in it, it does not print well. The second option is to download a CSV file and open it in excel and format it before printing. This is a bit cumbersome and not really worth using unless you just need a data dump.

After my company realized the lack of custom report printing, they deemed the app not usable as is. I read where you are adding graphs and charts and that is great but we will still need some sort of report writer in the app as well.

Another option might be to give us some sort of ODBC connection to our data were we can write our own report in crystal reports or something like that.

[David_Arthur]

I’m currently looking at airtable as an alternative to podio…

Reports are built in to podio but they aren’t that feature rich and have their shortcomings.
What we really could do with is an integration with microsoft powerbi which is designed purely for reporting so has an amazing wealth of features.

I’ve just started looking at this so perhaps theres a way… anyone know?

[Katherine_Duh]

For folks in this thread who wanted charts and customizable printed reports: we just finished rolling out beta access to charts and page designer for all users on Pro plans. If you’re on a Pro plan, go ahead and check it out!

As always, we’d also love to hear more about other specific features/functionalities that you all want, and how you’d use them. The more detail you can give us on your workflows and what you need, the easier it is for us to take that feedback into consideration when we’re building features. :thumbs_up:

If you have specific feedback on our chart and page designer features, please email it to blocksfeedback@airtable.com, instead of posting about it here, as they’re still in beta.

[Allen_Price]

I’ll gladly move to a pay account once reporting is an option, so I’m looking forward to reviewing this option once it is available. Need to be able to run reports across tables based on linked fields. Ideally, there is an option for getting this data into excel, but also another option for custom reports where we can choose which fields show up and the layout on the page.

[Andy_Brice]

I would love to be able to automatically email out a simple report every week that summarised how many people attended our charity, how they were broken down by age, nationality, gender etc. All the information is in Airtable already. I can find out the information using grouping and filtering, but it is tedious and time consuming. I don’t mind writing some script/code.

[Terrie_Beloin]

Is it possible for the backend tables to be accessed via SQL? What is the underlying database of Airtable (mySQL? Oracle? Teradata?)

[Katherine_Duh]

We just released the Airtable Blocks platform today, which is extremely relevant to this topic!

Blocks are modular apps that live on top of your Airtable bases. You can mix and match blocks of your choosing onto a dashboard for your whole base (see above image). Initially, we’re releasing 27 blocks, with more to come. Some of the blocks that are likely relevant to folks creating dashboards:

• Chart
• Pivot table
• Summary
• Timeline

Blocks is normally a feature for Pro and Enterprise users only, but we’re giving everyone a free trial of Blocks until the end of Saturday, March 31. Please try it out! :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m going to close this thread, since Airtable’s capabilities have changed dramatically since this thread was created. If you have any suggestions for specific blocks or Blocks in general, you can reach out to us at blocks@airtable.com.