Learning Airtable

Chapter 4. View Essentials

Views are an essential piece of what makes Airtable effective as a collaboration platform. Airtable Views offer more options for how data can be viewed than what you see in a spreadsheet. For example, you can put a filter on a spreadsheet column to see the tasks that occurred within the last year. But let’s assume that your colleague opens the file a few hours later, clears your filter, and creates a different filter on a column. When you return to the file, the filtered rows you see are different, and the resulting rows of their filter is now in place. With Airtable, instead of just a single snapshot of the data, you and each of your collaborators have multiple customized views from the different Airtable view types (e.g., Grid, Calendar), each of which can have its own filter (and more).

Airtable gives you six kinds of views to configure for visualizing your data. For example, you might want to understand your data over a period of time. You can create a Calendar view, a Timeline view, or a Gantt view. Or you may need to see a more visual representation of your records, where an image from each record is enlarged on a movable card. This is possible with the Gallery and Kanban views. Views can serve these needs, and countless others, without changing the underlying data in your base. Among these six types, you can create multiple views of the same type.

When you first create an Airtable base, you are presented with a Grid view. This is the view in Airtable ...