[SOLVED] Add report builder or other reporting tools

Hey Kal,

Thanks for the suggestion! Agreed that reporting will be really useful. We have something in the works that should do exactly what you mentioned here We’ll keep you posted…

Hi Andrew, Any idea when. I want to star using airtable but would love to see reporting.

REALLY need some basic report writing in order to make the database easier to use and print from, especially by those who don’t want to get involved in learning to navigate the database. It’s also difficult just to get fields moved around for simple export (I don’t always want the Name field to be first).

Thanks for considering!

I’d love to be able to use the reporting feature to be able to print labels (i.e. shipping labels or hard drive labels) so the ability to format the report would be lovely.

I would adore the ability to print a report with name and attached image for a building directory

Please allow me to beta test this feature. I have to report numbers that are in my airtable every Friday morning

I would also Really like to see this reporting feature added to airtable! It would greatly increase its use for me and my team. I would be creating reports on a daily basis.

Yes please. I would love to have a reporting tools. I would be sold on Airtable if you could add this functionality. The sooner the better. ETA?

I like this idea too!

Please add this idea!

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.

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

Reports and graphs would make this app solid.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?