Learning Airtable

Chapter 1. Introducing Airtable

Airtable is a tool for builders of all kinds. Like other tools in the no-code movement, Airtable democratizes the ability to create custom applications and software processes. And while there are many no-code solutions offering to widen the tent of software development, there are many reasons why Airtable is a popular choice in the increasingly crowded field.

In this first chapter, we’ll start by looking at how Airtable fills an important niche by combining elements of a spreadsheet with a database. We’ll then look at its primary components and what makes it special in comparison to other options, and then we’ll have a brief primer on how Airtable thinks about, and structures, data.

What Is Airtable?

Both Airtable newcomers and veterans can understandably struggle with how to describe it. As you create your first base, you’ll see the Grid view (shown in Figure 1-1), which looks deceptively like a spreadsheet. While Airtable does share some properties of a spreadsheet, it is a full-fledged relational database with the same underlying principles of organizing data as the desktop standby Microsoft Access or the high-capacity databases that run much of the web, such as MySQL and Postgres. What may look like another tab in a freeform spreadsheet is actually a structured table of data.

Airtable’s Grid view mirrors the visuals of a spreadsheet’s multipurpose columns and rows of cells. Beware: these are not columns and rows of independent cells. Instead, ...