Learning Airtable

Chapter 8. Formulas

Airtable combines the structured data of a database with the user-friendly ability to easily manipulate data. With Airtable formulas inside a relational database like Airtable, you can also learn different ways to perform mathematical operations, combine and rearrange text, and combine and analyze data from other fields. And all of this can be done in Airtable without understanding programming.

Spreadsheets allow anyone to manipulate and reformat data without understanding programming. Users can incrementally learn different formula types in Excel or Google Sheets and build an arsenal of powerful tools to manipulate and reformat their data. Airtable’s “Formula” field is similarly accessible and powerful and lets any user pick up formula functions on an as-needed basis.

Just like a spreadsheet, Airtable can manipulate several types of data. For instance, you can manipulate numerical data. You can also manipulate text, which means you can parse and transform strings of texts into other data types, such as dates, when needed. This level of personalization is getting close to the type of data manipulation one might use when programming, using JavaScript or Python, but through a more gentle introduction for the nondeveloper interested in no-code tools like Airtable.

Formulas can also manipulate date and time data. Date and time data don’t look terribly different from strings or numbers, but the many ways a date can be structured make it worthy of having its own ...