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D

I am trying to utilize Airtable as an inventory management system and I have inventory that I receive on certain days and send out on other days. I am currently using Google Docs to track this but I really like Airtable features so I would like to transition however, I am having difficulties trying to figure out some things. Once we ship the items I move them to a different tab and put in the date that the items are sold as a header with all the items below that for the day. Then I use formulas to calculate the length of time that I kept the inventory.

I want to figure out

  1. How to calculate the date as I get NaN when I subtract the two.
  2. How do I move one record from one table to another
  3. Is there a way to put in header rows (like merged colored rows above certain information

Thank you to everyone for your help as I am very new to Airtable

    2 replies

    J

    Airtable does not behave at all like a Spreadsheet (despite their advertising slogans), so you’ll have to adjust the way you think about your records a bit, but I assure you that Airtable will work great for what you are trying to do.

    1. You cannot do “math” operations on Dates in Airtable. Airtable acts like a SQL database in handling data-types, so they provide functions for working with dates. You’ll want to use the DATETIME_DIFF() function to find the difference between two dates.

    2. You won’t want to do this in Airtable. Instead, use things like check boxes, or a date field to mark the date something was shipped. Then, use “Views” to filter your records to see only what you want to see in a given View. You are still looking at the same Table, which has all of your “Shipment” records (or whatever you call them), but you are filtering it down to show only those with a “Shipped” date or with the “Shipped” check box checked. You can build as many Views as you need to view different slices of your data. Try using the “Grouping” feature to group your records by those that are shipped and those that aren’t, or Group by Shipping date, or Group by Shipping month, etc. You can achieve all the same things you used to do by moving records across sheets in Google Docs by using “Views” in Airtable.

    3. There is not a way to do this in Airtable, but I reckon once you get a handle on how Airtable works as a database rather than a spreadsheet, you can come up with other mechanisms to accomplish what you used to accomplish with these header rows.

    The gist of all of that is that you have to adjust the way you think about the structure of your data when making the switch from Spreadsheets, because Airtable is a database, and not a spreadsheet.

    D
    • DDB2376
    • Author
    • New Participant
    • 1 reply
    • December 11, 2018

    Thank you very much.

    1. The DATETIME_DIFF() function worked perfectly. I had to add a bunch of extra columns for the formula though because I had to split it. It seems that there can only be a dual action in each formula instead of string?

    2. I was able to copy the information from the inbound table to the outbound table and make it work from there. I believe it will provide what I need with some tweaks.

    Thank you again for your help.

    J
    1 person likes this
    • J
      Jeremy_Oglesby

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