Has anyone built a custom dashboard or reporting tool for Airtable?

[BenInDallas]

I’ve been using Airtable for a while now on a limited basis. I really want to deploy to my entire company as a project management tool (one base with tables for Clients, Departments, Projects, Tasks, Notes, Events, etc), but two key features are missing for me:

1. A Dashboard- What I’d like is a kind of “me view” that any user can use as a home page for the base… it would automatically display (in some simple grid/block form) everything related to a given collaborator… every client, project task, message, etc, that they are associated with… with clickable links to the actual record in Airtable. This is far more than a custom Airtable “View”, because it involves data from more than one table.

2. A Reporting Tool - Basically, we need to be able to (at a moment’s notice) generate a printable project status report from a given Airtable view (a grid/spreadsheet-style view of dozens of projects, ideally with page headers/footers, numbered rows, labeled columns, and all the other features you’d see on a typical Excel spreadsheet when printed). The current “print view” feature doesn’t offer enough control, and the new Page Designer is a great tool, but is not suited for printing multiple records on a page.

My best guess is that each of these items could be accomplished with a web page that pulls data from the Airtable API. The dashboard is probably the harder climb, since it’s pulling data from multiple tables and filtering it in a much more complex way. Not sure if a hyperlink back to an airtable record is even possible.

I’m not a programmer, but I’m somewhat familiar with the API and its ability to generate JSON objects, and I’ve browsed third-party tools like Airpress. A jquery library like DataTables would probably also be useful. I’m just curious if other users have built anything along these lines for their own base(s) that would serve as a good model or case study for mine?

[Julian_Kirkness]

Hi

YOumay not have heard of Blocks - a set of new features in beta at the moment - you may like to read more here:

Airtable - Support

Getting started with Airtable blocks

Airtable blocks are a Pro plan feature, letting you extend the functionality of your bases. You can use blocks to bring new information into Airtable, visualize and summarize your records in colorf...

[BenInDallas]

Julian, thanks. Yes, I’m familiar with Blocks. Honestly, I’m not really impressed. Most of the tools fall into the category of toys or weirdly case-specific utilities. There are definitely a few power tools in there, but I’m not sure any of them do quite what I’m looking for.

The Record List block is KIND OF like what I’d need for a Dashboard. Theoretically, I could set up blocks for each employee (My Projects, My Tasks, etc). But it would be a bit of a pain to set up, because I’d have to build (for EACH of my 20+ users) 2-3 user-specific views AND 2-3 blocks.

As I mentioned in my original post, the Page Designer is an awesome tool, and I hope to be able to employ it for expense reports, etc. But it really only works for printing one record per page. If you’re looking for something more like a status report, with 10-20 records per page in a spreadsheet-style display, it falls apart.

[Julian_Kirkness]

Mmm - I didn’t really read you OP properly - producing a user specific dashboard is beyond the scope of Blocks at the moment I think!

What would really help would be a feature to create views filtered by the logged on Collaborator. Quite a lot would follow on from that - and may be able to be the basis of user centric dashboards when the views form the basis of Block elements.

At some point, I think Airtable will also need to introduce some proper relational reporting from the data.

[BenInDallas]

Yes! Some sort of “Me View” is mandatory. It would solve LOTS of problems. And a few minor improvements to the Print Designer would probably solve the reporting issues, too.

Until then, I do think it would be possible (through the API’s JSON objects) to set up a series of web pages that serve the purposes I’ve outlined above. I’m just curious whether anyone else has tried something similar, or if I’m entering uncharted waters.