How To Use Airtable For Project Management
Airtable is an innovative and award-winning app that has revolutionized how businesses can manage their projects and tasks. It was created by a team of ex-Google engineers who noticed how difficult it was to keep track of all the projects they had going on at any given moment.
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Airtable lets you create custom lists, which are known as “tables,” so you can easily organize your project data in one convenient place. For those business owners who want to use this tool for themselves or with their staff, we have compiled a list of how to use Airtable for project management in different types of businesses as well as how to use their templates for a quick start!
What is Airtable?
Airtable is a Work Management Solution that has a wide range of uses. Airtable will feel familiar to you if you’re used to Spreadsheet-based tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. As this Airtable review demonstrates, Airtable can help you and your team with the following activities:
- Organise those repeat tasks
- Get an overview of the whole project
- Make sure people are assigned their correct tasks
- Use templates to quickly create what you need
- Add features such as project budget management
- Easily share files with the team
- Integrate with other software
Start with using a template
The Airtable Workspace’s setup may be difficult for novices, but it includes several ready-made templates to help you get started.
Airtable has a large number of templates, which range from personal projects to more standard commercial themes. Whatever you want to accomplish with an Airtable Database, there are ready-made templates for it in the Airtable ecosystem.
Airtable Templates are simplified, idealized versions of Airtable Bases (Databases) that are tailored to a wide range of use cases. The Templates incorporate the industry’s finest practices based on input from a variety of Airtable users, but they’ve been streamlined and simplified to make it simpler for novices to learn.
Create custom views for your data
Views in a Database are distinct for each table; you may restrict the display of certain fields or records, as well as apply other settings to control and monitor the data in that View. Each View has its own set of options for concealing, ordering, and filtering rows from a table.
The Airtable app gives you the option of building your own custom Airtable Views, such as the Calendar View to help you meet the demands of your team, a Classic Spreadsheet for a Grid View, and a Gallery View that shows files in their native format. This function is especially beneficial while using Airtable for project management.
Don’t forget there’s good file storage
Airtable allows you to keep a large number of file attachments in your Database records. Storage capacities range from 2GB to 1000GB, and they are available in several pricing tiers. In this manner, you may store your Project Data on your Airtable Base without it running out of space.
For the file attachments, the Airtable app supports a variety of formats, including:
- Images and Videos
- Documents in PDF format
- Spreadsheets, including CSV file support
Use the task management features
You may enter Task Data, such as how long someone spends on a project, in the tables in your Airtable Workspace. You’ll get rapid views of project standings if you manually update it frequently.
With Airtable Project Management, you can also share the Calendar View with your team members to create and manage project timetables and to-do lists for greater versatility. This function of Airtable Project Management makes managing a project possible.
Project management templates in action
Here’s an example of a simple project tracker that also includes tasks and clients. Like an editorial calendar for content marketing, this project tracker lets you have different views within a single source to ensure that the project manager and their team can see what they need.
Design projects
The first view is called design projects and is a high level view of the all the projects that this fictional company has to complete. This includes a project lead and team, a kickoff date and also what category the project falls under.
There’s a link record to the Client tab to easily see what clients have what ongoing projects.
Ideas for additional views include incomplete projects grouped by project leader, completed projects and calendars showing a project calendar and due dates only.
Tasks
The second tab is tasks and contains subtasks with tick boxes to allow each person to see the specific elements they are required to complete for each larger task.
The subtasks column makes use of the Long Text option and includes the rich text formatting that allows for checklists, code blocks and more.
Clients
The third example tab is the Clients one where you can see some basic information about each client and a link back to their current projects.
Basics about the company and their logo can be added here. You could also add if someone in particular is responsible for this client as a users field.
Airtable project management in action
This is just one of the various project management bases that Airtable offers in templates and there’s nothing to stop you creating something unique around what your project team needs. In terms of project management tools, it offers a great combination of the best of a spreadsheet software with database capacities and simple task management features.
