5/25/2021 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S08-E04

Duration: 64 minutes

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The BuiltOnAir Podcast is Sponsored by On2Air – Integrations and App extensions to run your business operations in Airtable.

In This Episode

Welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast, the live show.  The BuiltOnAir Podcast is a live weekly show highlighting everything happening in the Airtable world.

Check us out at BuiltOnAir.com. Join our community, join our Slack Channel, and meet your fellow Airtable fans.

Todays Hosts

Alli Alosa – Hi there! I’m Alli 🙂 I’m a fine artist turned “techie” with a passion for organization and automation. I’m also proud to be a Community Leader in the Airtable forum, and a co-host of the BuiltOnAir podcast. My favorite part about being an Airtable consultant and developer is that I get to talk with people from all sorts of industries, and each project is an opportunity to learn how a business works.

Dan Fellars – I am the Founder of Openside, On2Air, and BuiltOnAir. I love automation and software. When not coding the next feature of On2Air, I love spending time with my wife and kids and golfing.

Hannah Wiginton – I help bold, active entrepreneurs and companies with digital marketing through creative and technical content and systems.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:00:36 –

Scripting Time – 00:27:02 –

Explore Scripting with “Update Airtable Script”.

We continue our development of a 2 way sync between bases. This time we dig into the automation script needed to perform either a create or update in the destination table based on a value from the source table. Full code here: https://gist.github.com/on2air/c1f296fa811817a655cc9920d640242e.

View Script

Field Focus – 00:35:45 –

A deep dive into the Rollup Field Rollup – Alli Alosa explains how to use a rollup field with CRM Example in Airtable.com 

Learn More Here

Air Chefs – 00:56:05 –

Watch as Alli Alosa takes on Hannah Wiginton to improve the base Event Planning Base from the Airtable Universe, and make it even better with automations, different field types, and apps from the marketplace.

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:00:36

Roundup of what’s happening in the Airtable communities – Airtable, BuiltOnAir, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Segment: Scripting Time

Start Time: 00:27:02

Scripting Time: Update Airtable Script – We continue our development of a 2 way sync between bases. This time we dig into the automation script needed to perform either a create or update in the destination table based on a value from the source table. Full code here: https://gist.github.com/on2air/c1f296fa811817a655cc9920d640242e

Explore Scripting with “Update Airtable Script”.

We continue our development of a 2 way sync between bases. This time we dig into the automation script needed to perform either a create or update in the destination table based on a value from the source table. Full code here: https://gist.github.com/on2air/c1f296fa811817a655cc9920d640242e.

View Script

Segment: Field Focus

Start Time: 00:35:45

Learn about the Rollup Field – Alli Alosa explains how to use a rollup field with CRM Example in Airtable.com

A deep dive into the Rollup Field Rollup – Alli Alosa explains how to use a rollup field with CRM Example in Airtable.com 

Learn More Here

Segment: Air Chefs

Start Time: 00:56:05

Alli Alosa vs Hannah Wiginton improve the Airtable base, Event Planning Base

Watch as Alli Alosa takes on Hannah Wiginton to improve the base Event Planning Base from the Airtable Universe, and make it even better with automations, different field types, and apps from the marketplace.

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:00:01] 
[00:00:02] Welcome to the BuiltOnAir podcast, the live show. This is episode four of
[00:00:07] season eight. Glad you could be with us today. I am Dan Fellars with us today.
[00:00:13] We have Aaliyah Lohse and Hannah Wigington,
[00:00:17] both regular
[00:00:19] host with us today. Welcome
[00:00:23] All right Today's show, we're gonna be doing a lot of variety stuff.
[00:00:27] BuiltOnAir podcast is a variety show where we do four different segments
[00:00:31] throughout the hour and lots of fun and different things today.
[00:00:36] Um As always, we're gonna start off by talking about what's going on in the
[00:00:40] community,
[00:00:41] what we call our around the basis and we'll go through each of the communities
[00:00:45] and just have a discussion of what's new, what's going on, what people are
[00:00:49] talking about to keep you informed of everything happening in the Airtable
[00:00:52] universe.
[00:00:54] So with that we always like to start with Airtables community always the kind
[00:01:00] of place, centralized place where where lots of discussion going on.
[00:01:06] Um I don't know if either of you have been involved in in the community this
[00:01:09] week
[00:01:11] discussion. And I think one thing I I saw was
[00:01:16] lots of discussion around um document creation, which is always a hot topic,
[00:01:23] you know, page designer always trying to figure out how to make.
[00:01:26] Page designer work for people.
[00:01:30] Um it seems to be an ongoing battle I think is
[00:01:35] working with that, but there was a or is it Oh yeah, here's one that's got quite
[00:01:40] a bit, this has been happening for um
[00:01:44] Months now, years, 2019
[00:01:49] automatic document creation. Um
[00:01:53] so there are solutions out there. Many extension has one um there's a new one
[00:01:59] document that I think is mentioned in here as well.
[00:02:03] Uh actually leaked a little bit of information of something coming in on to air,
[00:02:08] not quite ready to release, but it's in development and I've been playing with
[00:02:12] it and it's amazing, it's gonna be awesome.
[00:02:16] Uh somewhere uh
[00:02:19] great, yeah, that would be a great edition because page designer people,
[00:02:25] you know, it's great to have something, but it's just so basic,
[00:02:30] you just can't do a whole lot with it.
[00:02:33] Yeah, yeah, and that's where, you know, third part, it's a tough problem to
[00:02:39] solve. Um
[00:02:41] you know, our approach is to integrate with with the google suite,
[00:02:45] which already has a lot of the functionality that you would need.
[00:02:48] And so
[00:02:50] um that's kind of the approach that we're taking, but there are third party
[00:02:54] solutions document I think is very promising. Um I think I think that will
[00:03:01] develop over time as a solid solution.
[00:03:04] Um
[00:03:05] you know, Bill Bill french has done some stuff, he's got some interesting
[00:03:12] approaches.
[00:03:14] So yeah, so definitely, you know, using, you know, this approach,
[00:03:19] the zap, your approach and google slides,
[00:03:22] you know that that definitely is is a possibility
[00:03:26] I guess process street looks like they've got something
[00:03:30] so there's lots of different ways, I don't think that there is like the perfect
[00:03:36] solution out there for document creation
[00:03:39] um uh maybe it's coming, hopefully
[00:03:44] I hope the Airtable, just all they would need to do is just like allow us to
[00:03:48] automate pulling the pdf out of page designer, like that would be,
[00:03:52] that would just be amazing. It would solve so many problems.
[00:03:55] Yeah, but that was in the ability to grow tables right? The dynamic hype
[00:04:03] issue,
[00:04:05] Yeah. Oh that that would be huge to like to be able to, you know,
[00:04:09] push it down to another page if it's too long. Um
[00:04:13] something that I do and I'll get into it a little bit during the field focus
[00:04:16] section is I
[00:04:18] mark up data with html and then I push that to um google docs
[00:04:23] or there's or like cloud convert, there's several third party apps that you can
[00:04:27] turn html into a pdf. Um
[00:04:30] it's a little more technical but it's a little more customizable as well.
[00:04:35] I actually think our friend Calvin has a has an app in the marketplace that that
[00:04:40] does that as well.
[00:04:42] Um so that's that's an app we're checking out in the app store
[00:04:47] and uh yeah, so that anything else going on
[00:04:54] both downloads that seems to be uh challenge
[00:05:00] and yeah, there's a lot of discussion on that one. That's also one that's been
[00:05:03] around for a while.
[00:05:05] Um
[00:05:07] Yeah.
[00:05:09] Mhm.
[00:05:11] And trying to look for other.
[00:05:15] Mm hmm
[00:05:17] There's another one google docs from Airtable. So yeah, so that's kind of the
[00:05:23] approach that that we're looking to take and make that easier.
[00:05:29] Mm So who tweets? That's interesting because who tweet? They actually have
[00:05:34] direct integration with Hoot suite so you don't need to go through Sappier
[00:05:38] anymore. Hopefully.
[00:05:40] Yeah, interestingly enough on in another facebook group I'm in,
[00:05:46] it's a copyrighting group. Someone was asking about a way to keep their content
[00:05:52] calendar and then post to, you know, all the social media
[00:05:57] outlets. And I said, well you can use Airtable and they have a hoot suite
[00:06:02] integration so then you can, you know, just do everything from there.
[00:06:05] And a couple of days later she replied back and she goes, oh my gosh!
[00:06:10] Airtable like I'm in all, I have a new playground and I was like,
[00:06:15] well welcome come to the BuiltOnAir community and the facebook group.
[00:06:21] Nice job
[00:06:23] analyzer.
[00:06:26] Very good. Yeah, that's um,
[00:06:30] that, that is a use case and you actually can get to where you don't even need
[00:06:35] hoot suite right? Except for instagram but Airtable has direct connections to
[00:06:41] twitter
[00:06:42] and facebook. So for if those are your only channels you can actually schedule
[00:06:48] it, you know using automation and dates all within Airtable and then just push
[00:06:54] directly to twitter and facebook through those integrations
[00:06:57] whose sweet I'm sure gives you know more and it also has more connectors but,
[00:07:03] but you could actually, you know replicate a lot of what Hoot suite does
[00:07:07] directly in their table now. So let's see.
[00:07:11] I saw somebody,
[00:07:13] someone did one on the universe. I can't remember what the name of it is but
[00:07:17] they even used page designer to make a mock up of what each post would look like
[00:07:21] on each platform. And it was really cool. It was like they have like the like
[00:07:24] buttons at the bottom and everything and it looks really slick I think.
[00:07:28] Yeah, I think it's in the university you can get, there's a marketing day
[00:07:33] a base that has the page designer all designed out for.
[00:07:37] Yeah, that I've actually used that with the clients. Really cool.
[00:07:42] So that works one more. I was gonna show on this one. This is an interesting one.
[00:07:47] So if you're not aware, Airtable does have a limitation on the number of fields
[00:07:52] that you can create.
[00:07:54] So 500 fields is the maximum number of fields, which seems like a lot,
[00:08:00] but apparently not for some people
[00:08:04] who are per base per table. Yeah.
[00:08:09] So per table, one table can have up to 500 fields in it
[00:08:14] and which is different than the records. The records are across all tables.
[00:08:19] But the field limit is per table.
[00:08:22] And so man, that is a lot of fields to to maintain. But I understand what what
[00:08:29] this person was doing was
[00:08:32] they have a lot of complex formulas and instead of having all of that complexity
[00:08:37] and one formula, they break it into smaller pieces and then aggregate up into
[00:08:43] another formula. You referencing the smaller formula. So
[00:08:48] so you could do that um you know, that could grow pretty big if you're doing,
[00:08:53] you know, versus the one mega formula that's got everything in it.
[00:08:59] Yeah,
[00:09:00] so but yeah, it's not well advertised, although I think I think Calvin might
[00:09:05] have linked to it, that shows where it is. I hadn't seen this page right here,
[00:09:09] but it talks about some of the limitations. It's not advertised,
[00:09:13] it's not on the pricing page. So it's somewhere buried in the support that talks
[00:09:18] about um
[00:09:20] some of those less known limitations. So
[00:09:25] yeah, so if you, if you've got a big, I would probably say that,
[00:09:29] I don't know ali what's the biggest number of fields you've seen?
[00:09:33] Yeah,
[00:09:34] I have a couple of tables that are in the higher hundreds. Um,
[00:09:39] I have also, I've done a coaching session with somebody that they have a big
[00:09:43] team that uses Airtable and every time they want to add a new field,
[00:09:47] they have to find one that they can delete
[00:09:49] before they can do it like that. It was that big. Yeah, that's,
[00:09:55] that's pretty intense. Uh,
[00:09:58] you know, I just imagine the rolling that you have to do to,
[00:10:01] to find your data. It becomes really frustrating. Like I've had people that like
[00:10:07] I, I wrote a script once to allow somebody to type in a field name and it'll
[00:10:12] tell them what tables it's on like
[00:10:15] because they couldn't even find where each was.
[00:10:20] Yeah. That's crazy. That's where plug for On2Air amplify, That's where that
[00:10:24] would come in. Help manage some of that complexity. So
[00:10:29] yeah, so it they're out there in the wild, some pretty big uh,
[00:10:34] basis. Um, alright, continuing on the next community is our own BuiltOnAir
[00:10:40] community. We have a large, um, slack community where people can talk about
[00:10:45] what's going on different channels for different topics.
[00:10:49] Um, also just a great place to interact and get kind of more real time.
[00:10:55] Uh, support. So check that out. Sign up for our newsletter BuiltOnAir dot com.
[00:11:00] And um, there's, there's been some interesting discussion questions about
[00:11:06] amplify, I think duplicate records. That's, that's something that will be coming
[00:11:11] and amplify. I've gotten some good feedback on that, but it's definitely a
[00:11:15] challenge,
[00:11:16] I've heard multiple times. You know, people trying to figure out how do you deal
[00:11:21] with duplicates? There is a there is a gap in the marketplace that helps
[00:11:27] with duplicates so you can do that.
[00:11:30] Um
[00:11:32] And then
[00:11:33] there was another oh yeah dealing with importing data, Jason data.
[00:11:39] So if you're dealing with importing data actually I've been working with Peter
[00:11:43] on
[00:11:43] on finding a solution there for him with with our products as well.
[00:11:49] So um data migration for images, how do you get images into Airtable was
[00:11:57] another discussion we're having.
[00:11:59] Um That's a challenge. It needs to be the biggest thing with attachments or
[00:12:05] images is um you know anything like the scripting app, actually the script app
[00:12:13] scripting you can actually upload an image or an attachment.
[00:12:18] They do have, don't they Alley or am I making that up?
[00:12:21] They've got a file load.
[00:12:23] They do but it might have only been for C. S. I think they only accept certain
[00:12:27] file types but they could have improved upon that recently. I'm not sure.
[00:12:31] That's right. I think it is C. S. V. Only. That was the limitation so
[00:12:38] um
[00:12:39] yeah to process it because and then you have to read it and so they don't allow
[00:12:45] to. The main thing is you have to somehow get it up into the cloud for
[00:12:50] attachments. And so that was the recommendation here for cherries you got to get
[00:12:55] it into like google drive or some box or dropbox.
[00:12:59] And then from there everything has the U. R. L. And then it can get into um
[00:13:04] into Airtable via the api so.
[00:13:08] Uh huh.
[00:13:09] We do that in our amplify product. We do have a way to upload and but we have to
[00:13:15] we had to come up with our own way to get it up to the cloud and then download
[00:13:19] it and tear table. So
[00:13:21] not, not an easy thing, but it is doable.
[00:13:24] Yeah.
[00:13:26] All right. Moving on Airtable. Um, again there are, sorry, read it for Air
[00:13:32] Table
[00:13:33] a bit more technical. Um, there's the document just launched talking about that.
[00:13:40] Um, you see a lot of bubble discussion actually also on the facebook community.
[00:13:46] I'm seeing more and more people talking about bubble
[00:13:50] sir.
[00:13:50] Yeah. So that seems to be uh, an integration. You know, I still haven't,
[00:13:56] I have played with bubble but still haven't adopted it.
[00:14:00] Um, but seems like others are chris Dancy, most connecting and he's got some
[00:14:07] crazy charts going on.
[00:14:09] Yeah.
[00:14:10] So fascinating. Always. Yeah, he posted inside. When we get to the facebook
[00:14:16] community, he has another post
[00:14:19] similar to this. It's interesting to see he puts everything in there and I love
[00:14:24] organizing, but oh, he's way above me.
[00:14:29] Yeah, three D. Tour of every room. So cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:37] I don't know that anybody could compete with him on diagramming their life.
[00:14:44] Yeah.
[00:14:45] Questions on the Airtable schema. Um so I guess there was like a code,
[00:14:52] there was, there was some code out there. This was, you know,
[00:14:55] one of the biggest challenges is for developers trying to understand that the
[00:15:00] schema of a base.
[00:15:02] Um and so in the past there was like scripts that you could use to like extract
[00:15:08] it from the api documentation page and then they released a met A.
[00:15:13] P. I. But it looks like they've they've shut off access to that.
[00:15:18] It seems like people, we do have access to it. Um and they did have it open for
[00:15:23] a while and then it seems like they've
[00:15:25] kind of close that off. They're not opening that up
[00:15:31] so people are still trying to solve that issue.
[00:15:35] They did make major improvements to the schema app I think I mean they did a
[00:15:40] while back but at first when the app came out like
[00:15:43] I didn't it was not usable if your base was like over a certain you know if you
[00:15:47] have too many fields or too many tables it was just you couldn't zoom in or out
[00:15:51] or move it around but now you can zoom in, zoom out and drag around the tables
[00:15:55] so it actually works pretty well.
[00:15:57] Mhm
[00:15:59] Interesting. Yeah. Yeah that's a good one.
[00:16:02] All right. Um People looking for help. Oh yeah this was when I was gonna bring
[00:16:08] out where to go
[00:16:09] browser or apps so there are actual um apps that you can like run from your
[00:16:16] computer. They're basically just wrappers around the web application.
[00:16:20] But there are some nuances to it. So
[00:16:23] it was interesting. A poll on what you use. I'm going to vote,
[00:16:26] I still use it in the browser. Do either of you use the desktop app?
[00:16:31] I do but only because I have to be logged into like three accounts at one time
[00:16:36] so I'll have a different browser on each account but like the Airtable at the
[00:16:43] desktop app
[00:16:44] I don't mind but I can't use emojis as easily as I can because I have the touch
[00:16:50] bar on my Mac and that just doesn't pop up on the desktop and you got to have
[00:16:56] the another, jeez I I agree. Yes
[00:17:01] interesting. Some people swear by it, they love the desktop app.
[00:17:06] Yeah I just haven't got around to using the desktop app. So yeah I usually have
[00:17:12] lots of tabs going on. I use a plug in this session box that helps you have
[00:17:18] multiple tabs with different sections so that's that's useful for
[00:17:22] Logging into two different
[00:17:25] accounts
[00:17:27] so
[00:17:30] yeah.
[00:17:31] Yeah. Anything else?
[00:17:35] Yeah mostly technical
[00:17:38] stuff. Um
[00:17:42] All right let's go to facebook.
[00:17:46] I'm sorry.
[00:17:48] Yeah
[00:17:49] something
[00:17:51] let's refresh this page.
[00:17:56] Facebook is not playing nice. There we go.
[00:18:01] I think I saw ali I think you were responding.
[00:18:05] I did a little BuiltOnAir plug but it was uh yeah today pant.
[00:18:12] Um Someone I interviewed last season did pretty much exactly what this guy was
[00:18:16] looking for. Um And that you can take a picture of a receipt and it creates a J.
[00:18:21] Song file that you can push into Airtable with all the different numbers.
[00:18:25] It was pretty cool.
[00:18:27] Yeah that would be cool. Yeah so yeah there's definitely tools out there,
[00:18:32] that one is kind of like a open source Zapier replacement um
[00:18:37] which is pretty cool.
[00:18:39] Yeah. And eight and I believe it was called.
[00:18:43] Yeah. So yeah, so the issue was you had taken an image and trying to extract it
[00:18:49] and
[00:18:50] and extract the data. Here's the chris Dancy
[00:18:55] life in his world of
[00:18:58] he has this whole out out of all that
[00:19:02] technology he has in every room.
[00:19:05] So this one actually must,
[00:19:08] it's an older post but came back up
[00:19:14] um another another plug for bubble
[00:19:18] and
[00:19:21] how you can actually get uh
[00:19:25] pdf scent in the Airtable through bubble.
[00:19:29] So yeah, bubble is very flexible so you can definitely do a lot in there and
[00:19:34] they've got they've got some cool tools, but yeah, definitely he mentions it
[00:19:38] here a bit of a learning curve,
[00:19:41] I've heard that many times. So somebody else, it looks like telegram has an
[00:19:47] integration with their table. If you're doing any
[00:19:51] telegram
[00:19:52] messaging,
[00:19:55] you did you?
[00:19:56] And I think
[00:19:59] it's weird. Facebook's weird house, some are recent and some older.
[00:20:06] Mhm.
[00:20:08] Yeah, it's odd. You can change the sort, I think it sorts it by.
[00:20:11] If somebody commented recently on it, it puts it back at the top.
[00:20:17] Yeah, after
[00:20:19] there you go.
[00:20:24] All right, so for free mom hugs, how to stay organized.
[00:20:29] It's kind of tough.
[00:20:30] You know, you gotta need to know a little bit more about what
[00:20:34] trying to organize, but
[00:20:37] hopefully there's something in the universe to
[00:20:40] Oh per
[00:20:43] Mhm.
[00:20:47] Yeah, so that's kind of uh facebook. Don't see any new ones.
[00:20:53] More page designer questions. All right, last one is Youtube.
[00:20:59] See what kind of videos we've got going on
[00:21:01] again. Kind of.
[00:21:03] It's interesting. And now it's back to the old view of straight down they must
[00:21:07] be doing. So maybe testing last week they had a different layout,
[00:21:13] uh doing some testing now,
[00:21:16] it looks like
[00:21:17] you also have right now
[00:21:21] you are an integral matt and uh
[00:21:24] italian it looks like.
[00:21:26] And yeah, so we've got a lot of international um we got Aaron who works at our
[00:21:32] table, he's got a great channel
[00:21:35] we're checking out
[00:21:37] and then
[00:21:38] definitely Gareth as well.
[00:21:41] Great channel.
[00:21:43] Another bubble bubble again is the theme for today. I think this is the same one
[00:21:48] that was on Reddit
[00:21:51] developer, how to set up a P. I. N points,
[00:21:58] Um creating a crm. So this one's from Airtable. So this is an official one
[00:22:04] how to set up your Crm.
[00:22:07] Yeah,
[00:22:08] a new one from Airtable,
[00:22:10] copy paste. Yeah, copy paste. If you're trying to copy from Excel into Airtable
[00:22:18] may cause some issues. So that might be a good video if you run into that issue.
[00:22:24] Mhm.
[00:22:24] Yeah, I've noticed if you try and copy a column that has
[00:22:28] empty cells at the top, then it'll just
[00:22:32] start wherever the first row is.
[00:22:35] Like when you paste it, so I can totally get things miss transposed pretty
[00:22:40] easily. You could pay attention to it.
[00:22:42] Yeah.
[00:22:44] Yeah, you gotta be careful there. Yeah.
[00:22:47] Yeah, it looks like um
[00:22:51] yeah, lots of videos going on
[00:22:53] softer doing a demo.
[00:22:57] Also, she was on Bill 10 years podcast last season.
[00:23:02] So it looks like this is the uh
[00:23:06] I guess this is different than their
[00:23:08] than their
[00:23:11] they're off the record. So Ben and chris do a live show as well,
[00:23:16] looks like Kamille was on their show,
[00:23:20] so Kamille
[00:23:22] staying busy.
[00:23:24] Yeah.
[00:23:25] All right, so lots of new, lots of new videos, all sorts of stuff going on.
[00:23:33] Okay, so with that I think um no big announcements from Airtable this week that
[00:23:39] I'm aware of
[00:23:41] um
[00:23:42] but we are getting towards the end of the month, which seems to be when they put
[00:23:47] out their announcements, so maybe next week we'll have some new
[00:23:50] toys to play with from Airtable.
[00:23:54] Alright, we're now going to move on to a quick ad from our primary sponsor um
[00:24:00] On2Air is the primary sponsor of of the BuiltOnAir podcast.
[00:24:04] I'm the founder of Built on there and we're on on to air and want to do a
[00:24:10] spotlight on one of the features
[00:24:13] that we have inside of our amplify products. So amplifies the premier editor
[00:24:19] in the marketplace um for working with your Airtable data and makes it much
[00:24:25] easier to interact with your data and build things in columns as well as manager
[00:24:31] your stuff. And so today I wanted to highlight the benefits of using amplify for
[00:24:36] a quick data entry.
[00:24:38] And um, so within this interface you can see this is on a per record basis.
[00:24:45] So this is just one record. This is a sample of crm environment and you can lay
[00:24:50] out your data and columns and so you can set up as many columns as you want,
[00:24:54] grouped by what makes sense to your data.
[00:24:57] And you can also interact with data that's in the linked table itself.
[00:25:02] So this linked record is actually editing data in a separate table than our
[00:25:08] primary table here. And so with the ability to quickly add a new record,
[00:25:13] you just click on the plus button and that will take you to a blank row.
[00:25:18] And the cool thing is is we have the ability to set defaults where on every
[00:25:23] field within this
[00:25:25] you can specify default value. So for your status field, a new record always
[00:25:31] defaults to in progress. For the status we maybe have a default amount um
[00:25:38] or a default date when it's opened. So for dates you can actually say time stamp
[00:25:44] it to right now. And so let's and so then um once you create a new record you
[00:25:50] can simply set the default values and that will instantly
[00:25:55] um set the defaults that we had.
[00:25:58] And so it's set the status to in progress. That set the date open to today's
[00:26:03] date and it set the sales rep to the default sales rep. And you can see here
[00:26:08] this is the linked record that we see uh coming from the other table in this
[00:26:13] column. So with that you can you can do a lot of um you can set up different
[00:26:19] default in different columns. So depending on the use cases,
[00:26:22] you can have different ways to set your default value. So really powerful for
[00:26:28] data entry quickly. Um you can navigate through all of your records,
[00:26:33] add more in the next release, will have the ability to clone the current record
[00:26:38] and do much more there. So check out On2Air amplify in the marketplace and be
[00:26:46] able to maximize your interaction with your On2Air or your Airtable data.
[00:26:52] In working with the amplified product. Let's move on to our next segment.
[00:27:00] I'm going to continue on.
[00:27:02] So scripting time. So this is this is supposed to you're supposed to be thinking
[00:27:06] of the song closing time in your head. That's kind of what Okay,
[00:27:11] hang him now. Now it might be stuck in. You put that music in the background,
[00:27:18] maybe we'll add it for the for the uh credit.
[00:27:22] So scripting time very powerful aspect of of um Airtable is the ability to um
[00:27:32] generate scripts. And you can write scripts either inside of a scripting act app
[00:27:38] that you can like
[00:27:39] trigger off of a of a button click or you can also write scripts inside of an
[00:27:46] automation. And so for today we're going to continue on. If you look at previous
[00:27:52] episodes we have our automate create segment where we were dealing with some
[00:27:57] automation and working with Web hooks to communicate
[00:28:01] From one automation to another.
[00:28:03] And those were actually from one base to another. And so moving data,
[00:28:09] copying data from one base to another is really a powerful way of of using the
[00:28:15] web hooks to try to generate your own kind of sync process where both sides
[00:28:20] could be editable. So it has some advantages over using the
[00:28:25] the sync functionality from Airtable.
[00:28:27] But the last piece that we hadn't finished with automation is that does require
[00:28:31] some scripting is the ability to look for an existing record.
[00:28:36] And if you find it update your data with um the data that's coming from the
[00:28:43] automation. And if you don't find it then create a new record
[00:28:48] so that the built in Airtable automation is like creating a new record or
[00:28:55] updating an existing. They don't have the ability to kind of do one or the other
[00:28:59] depending on if you find a match. So we're going to do that scenario in our
[00:29:03] scripting time segment here. So I've got the layout of what we need to do.
[00:29:09] So the first thing that we need to do is um so we're passing in the name and the
[00:29:14] record I. D. And this record ideas coming from another base.
[00:29:17] So it's not the record idea of what we're looking for but we have a
[00:29:23] we have a source ID in this table and this is where we're going to store the
[00:29:28] source of where we're looking for a match. And so this is where we're going to
[00:29:33] perform a look up to say okay this is this is the record that's linked to our
[00:29:38] record from our other base. So that's where we're looking for the match.
[00:29:43] So to get the table from the base um
[00:29:48] we're going to call this our
[00:29:50] um pipeline
[00:29:53] table. So we create our variable,
[00:29:57] call that table pipeline.
[00:30:00] And so there's a built in variable called base that's always available.
[00:30:04] And I love um Airtables. Editor has a really good auto complete and it even
[00:30:10] gives you the names of your tables. that makes it really easy to pull in the
[00:30:15] table. So now I have a reference to my to my table and then now I need to get
[00:30:21] all the records with that table.
[00:30:23] Um
[00:30:25] So call them pipeline records.
[00:30:30] And so here we need to use the await um which is a way where it will sit there
[00:30:36] and wait while the table returns all of the records. And so we use the select
[00:30:41] record a sync and we're not adding any kind of sort. The sorting doesn't
[00:30:46] necessarily matter as much. Um So this will return us
[00:30:50] query record that gives everything that we need.
[00:30:54] And um
[00:30:57] there's other ways you can do this but there's kind of another step
[00:31:03] to get the actual records.
[00:31:06] You need to get them from this and it's just the record variable.
[00:31:11] So this isn't the function it's just the variables.
[00:31:15] Yeah so now we need to loop through them and find a matching record based on our
[00:31:21] input I. D. With mapping with the source ID in there.
[00:31:25] So we're gonna do a for loop. Um actually maybe not. Let's do a let's do uh find,
[00:31:33] so we're gonna look for our fine so we're gonna um
[00:31:37] so every variable or every array. So this is an array in javascript,
[00:31:42] there's a fine function on there
[00:31:45] and um
[00:31:48] and this is how you do a um
[00:31:55] so how we're looking up the value inside that record and we want the source ID.
[00:32:01] And we're gonna match it with our I. D.
[00:32:06] So if there is a match this will find it. So this will basically loop through
[00:32:11] all of the records and if the source ID is equal to our I. D.
[00:32:17] Then it will find it. So if something got returned here now we know that we need
[00:32:23] to um perform an update. Otherwise we're going to do a create.
[00:32:28] So simple way is um
[00:32:33] once we have our pipeline you can do an update, record a sync.
[00:32:39] So anytime you see they make it easy to know when you need to use the await
[00:32:43] function. Because I'm pretty sure all of their their pretty consistent all of
[00:32:48] their functions that end in a sync
[00:32:50] then require the weight. So they may they use that naming convention to make it
[00:32:56] easier to understand when when you need to use the await.
[00:33:00] Um And let's see
[00:33:03] yeah
[00:33:07] whether we need here. So we need our record ID. So that will be our match the I.
[00:33:13] D.
[00:33:14] And then our fields. And we're going to update our name. So that's all we're
[00:33:20] doing. We just passed our name
[00:33:23] and um
[00:33:27] so are name value here is gonna be to the name that we're passing in from the
[00:33:32] previous base.
[00:33:33] So that's the only update. And then on this side
[00:33:38] when we don't find a match that means we just need to do create
[00:33:44] so they create record a sync and we've got our weight and now this one you don't
[00:33:48] need to pass in an ID.
[00:33:50] And so we do our name
[00:33:55] and then on this one we need to add our source ID so that it's stored there um
[00:34:01] for future ones so that the next time now that we have our source idea with that
[00:34:06] the next time that this updates from our source it will find it and then just
[00:34:10] perform the update.
[00:34:12] So that should do our match our update or create depending on finding that that
[00:34:19] matching key value.
[00:34:20] So if everything ran correctly nothing was there. So this should create a new
[00:34:25] record with our name um
[00:34:30] in there. Let's see if it works
[00:34:33] ran successfully. So coffee packing and came
[00:34:37] and so it should
[00:34:40] um
[00:34:44] do not
[00:34:46] live demos.
[00:34:48] It is, it's at the top, it was
[00:34:50] right.
[00:34:52] So put it at the top. There you go. So we just updated the name obviously to
[00:34:57] finish this out, you'd update all of the values um that are coming over from the
[00:35:03] source and then now we have our source id
[00:35:06] um that the next time that this particular one would run it should match that
[00:35:11] and perform an update instead of a create.
[00:35:14] So a nice simple tool share this code with with this video and help you perform
[00:35:20] a live update or create from either the same base or a different base.
[00:35:26] However, it makes sense for your scenario.
[00:35:28] So hopefully that helps you with your scripting initiatives and getting you've
[00:35:33] been there, don't be afraid to jump into scripting. Definitely a learning curve,
[00:35:37] but it really opens up a whole new set of possibilities of of what you can do
[00:35:42] with with their table.
[00:35:45] All right,
[00:35:48] we are now going to go on to
[00:35:52] oops
[00:35:54] our field focus and to ali
[00:36:00] Share her screen here and she's gonna walk us through that one.
[00:36:04] All right, can you see my screen now? I'm not on the same window anymore.
[00:36:09] Excellent. All right. So I'm going to dive into the roll up field,
[00:36:15] which is my personal favorite favorite field. Um I almost never use a look up
[00:36:21] field anymore just because there's all sorts of caveats with it.
[00:36:25] Um
[00:36:26] With a rollup field,
[00:36:28] you can also pass a formula function within like the aggregate function.
[00:36:34] Um so that you can actually cut down significantly on the number of fields that
[00:36:38] you need.
[00:36:40] Um So most people are used to using a roll up field to perform like mathematical
[00:36:45] functions like you know, you can sum up numbers on another table or get an
[00:36:49] average.
[00:36:50] Um This one is pretty simple, is just looking at the dates of an interaction and
[00:36:55] to back up a little bit if you couldn't tell by the title. This is just a really
[00:36:58] basic crm example.
[00:37:01] Um So we have our people we have interactions and then companies um And then
[00:37:06] this summary table we'll talk about shortly.
[00:37:09] Um
[00:37:10] So this is very simple. Just we're looking at the date field on the interactions
[00:37:14] table and we're saying tell me what the most recent date is using the max values
[00:37:19] aggregate function.
[00:37:22] So a lot of people when they're looking at a crm, a question I see come up a lot
[00:37:28] is
[00:37:29] how do I know what the most recent interaction was?
[00:37:33] So this is stepped one to doing that and this will just tell you okay,
[00:37:38] this was the last time that I've reached out to this person,
[00:37:42] but then say you wanted to also pull in data from that most recent interaction
[00:37:47] and see that on your people table,
[00:37:50] you can go
[00:37:52] and
[00:37:54] essentially I must have it hidden. No, I don't.
[00:37:58] So this rollup field here
[00:38:02] is just essentially looking back at the people table and pulling over that roll
[00:38:08] up to get the latest interaction to get it back on the interactions table.
[00:38:13] So we're from the interactions were entering a date, we're getting the most
[00:38:17] recent date on the people table and then we're pushing that back over to the
[00:38:21] interactions.
[00:38:22] So now we can see for any given person what the most recent interaction was.
[00:38:28] And this is a kind of weird situation because what I would really love to be
[00:38:31] able to do is
[00:38:33] within this roll up field, write a function to compare the dates,
[00:38:37] but
[00:38:39] I it just never works, it always gives me an error. So if anybody has any ideas
[00:38:43] about that one.
[00:38:46] Uh huh.
[00:38:47] That's initially trick.
[00:38:49] Thank you. Yeah this is like
[00:38:52] so essentially I want to put this formula inside of the Rollup field
[00:38:57] but it doesn't, it just always gives me an error for some reason.
[00:39:02] Um But basically this is saying okay if my date and the most recent interaction
[00:39:07] are the same, then I know that this is my most recent interaction for this
[00:39:11] person.
[00:39:12] Uh huh.
[00:39:13] So if I were to go and add another row to Jonjo and make that today,
[00:39:19] this becomes our most recent interaction.
[00:39:22] Let's just put in a couple
[00:39:27] items in here
[00:39:31] and now on our people table.
[00:39:35] I can see in this roll up here,
[00:39:38] I've added a condition to show only where that field most recent is not empty.
[00:39:44] So it's just going to pull over the most recent
[00:39:47] data that I've collected from that interaction with that person.
[00:39:53] So that's something pretty helpful I think when it comes to crm s Yeah,
[00:39:58] yeah, like your cross referencing everything. So really anywhere you look,
[00:40:04] you just have this snapshot of of where you are in the interactions with the
[00:40:09] person.
[00:40:11] Exactly.
[00:40:13] And another thing people want to do is like see all of their notes that they've
[00:40:17] taken for that person.
[00:40:19] Um and I have kind of two ways here. This button is not
[00:40:23] using the rollup field which is the purpose of this little segment,
[00:40:26] but essentially this button leads to like a filtered view or no way I did it in
[00:40:30] page designer. Okay, cool.
[00:40:32] There's one option. Um but if I go back to my interactions table,
[00:40:40] I have this field here which is called notes. Roll up
[00:40:44] and any time I'm using a field that are like I'm creating a field with a formula
[00:40:47] that can essentially live in the background.
[00:40:50] I always put a little gear emoji in front of it so that I know like,
[00:40:53] hey, you can keep this hidden and don't mess with it.
[00:40:56] Um
[00:40:57] and essentially I'm just putting a little emoji and then time stamping it.
[00:41:02] And then I'm putting in the type of the context. So you can see in person,
[00:41:06] phone call or email
[00:41:08] and then all of the notes separated with a new line character.
[00:41:12] So for each interaction I have with a person, I got this little note bubble here.
[00:41:19] then I can roll that up
[00:41:22] on the people table
[00:41:24] and I can get
[00:41:26] time stamped list of all of my notes with a person.
[00:41:29] I love that.
[00:41:32] And the formula,
[00:41:34] what was that man? You got the separator in there to make it visual.
[00:41:39] Exactly. Right. This is totally arbitrary. Actually stole this from heaven.
[00:41:44] The little asterix. I was like, I think that's a cool idea, but I couldn't just
[00:41:49] get rid of those altogether and just have new lines
[00:41:54] and then it looks like this. Oops.
[00:41:57] Yeah, that's a great technique there. Um They don't give you the helper to let
[00:42:03] you know that you can add a separator in there. Although I think it is
[00:42:08] documented in their formula support page, but
[00:42:12] their their auto guy there doesn't tell you that. So it's a little bit of a
[00:42:16] hidden trick there. Exactly. And it comes in handy. Um definitely uh The little
[00:42:26] html trick I was talking about earlier
[00:42:29] is I use that for um
[00:42:32] Okay,
[00:42:33] I use the separator trick to do that.
[00:42:37] So if I wanted to like make a table of all of my interactions with a single
[00:42:41] person, like an html table,
[00:42:44] I usually just put in, you know, html table robe.
[00:42:50] And I can start by putting in my
[00:42:53] uh table data cells or tags here.
[00:42:57] I'll just do like person and date.
[00:43:02] I always use an if statement before I put in any
[00:43:07] date time format because if not you'll just get a bunch of errors
[00:43:12] and slash T. V.
[00:43:17] So essentially this can become one row of a table.
[00:43:21] Yeah.
[00:43:23] And then when I go back to my people table
[00:43:27] and I'll add a little roll up field
[00:43:30] interactions.
[00:43:36] I have a keyboard shortcut because I use this so much. And then if I do slash
[00:43:42] here
[00:43:43] pr as my separator
[00:43:47] and also start with T. O.
[00:43:50] And end with flash here.
[00:43:53] So there you see your showcasing that it's not just formulas that you can use
[00:43:57] their you can actually use the ampersand to concatenate strings.
[00:44:02] Yeah,
[00:44:02] exactly.
[00:44:04] I can say slash table.
[00:44:07] So now this becomes
[00:44:10] at little html table
[00:44:15] and I can put it in here. This is my little text editor that I used to display
[00:44:19] things
[00:44:21] and you can see that that's lining it up appropriately
[00:44:25] and you can get super super fancy with that awesome.
[00:44:31] Yeah, that trick really is powerful. Could you go back to the where you show the
[00:44:38] formula that it's the current note for the current direction?
[00:44:43] Absolutely.
[00:44:44] I just want to make sure that we
[00:44:47] really understand this. So
[00:44:50] if the day is that of the most
[00:44:53] yeah, I'm gonna move over my most recent
[00:44:59] and then the most recent is a roll up
[00:45:03] of a roll up of this of the date.
[00:45:07] So it's like date gets rolled up to people and then gets rolled back to
[00:45:12] interactions for each person.
[00:45:16] So it's kind of going up and down, right? And that one, the most recent
[00:45:20] interaction is using the max function right? To determine the max state.
[00:45:26] It is, yes, the same function on this table and on the people.
[00:45:32] One last little thing, I get way too excited, but I have this summary table and
[00:45:41] I have all of my people linked to it. So if you noticed here,
[00:45:44] I have this grouped by that summary record.
[00:45:47] Um
[00:45:49] So that way I can roll up all the names of everybody.
[00:45:53] I could do this with emails as well.
[00:45:57] Um And then here,
[00:45:59] this is a very handy formula that was shared by W Van Paul
[00:46:05] and he had shared it from somebody else I think from years ago.
[00:46:08] But basically this whole thing is saying, how many times does a value appear in
[00:46:14] this string?
[00:46:15] So
[00:46:16] I'm saying the name, how many times does the name john doe appear in this array
[00:46:23] joinery, compact values from people.
[00:46:27] So this is a different approach of getting duplicates in a base.
[00:46:30] Mhm.
[00:46:31] And I could see that john doe appears twice here. If I add another line and say
[00:46:36] jim doe,
[00:46:38] that should also,
[00:46:41] now we've got to jim knows there
[00:46:46] so
[00:46:47] whole bunch of stuff thrown at you. But then you could even do like the repeater
[00:46:52] to like generate the some graphic or something. Some emoji.
[00:46:57] Right? That's kind of what I did here was
[00:47:02] this is just another fun little roll up thing.
[00:47:04] Yeah,
[00:47:06] that's using the repeat function based on the percentage
[00:47:11] in the interactions table.
[00:47:13] Awesome.
[00:47:15] That is so cool. It's very powerful. The live, you know linking and determining
[00:47:22] a lot of times. Stuff like this you know would require like scripting or
[00:47:26] something but there are ways to do it.
[00:47:29] Um
[00:47:31] They may be extremely useful. Yeah
[00:47:34] I've been able to cut back on like a lot of my crazy roll ups ever since the
[00:47:38] scripting app came out just because I could move all of that but I can pretty
[00:47:43] much get any data where I needed to go with roll ups.
[00:47:47] Yeah awesome.
[00:47:49] The unspoken power of the roll up especially I think you were using the the the
[00:47:57] ability to filter a view dynamically. It used to be. I know I'm sure you both
[00:48:03] remember before that feature came out
[00:48:06] and there was still ways where you could kind of dynamically
[00:48:10] um select, but it was even more complex. Um
[00:48:15] So that makes it even a bit easier,
[00:48:18] definitely
[00:48:20] awesome. And is this something you can share with? The community?
[00:48:22] The space? Yeah, absolutely awesome. We'll get the share link in our show notes.
[00:48:30] Perfect.
[00:48:31] Great. Thank you. Ali thank you.
[00:48:35] All right.
[00:48:37] I'm going to bring us back.
[00:48:41] Mhm.
[00:48:42] So before we do our final segment, which Ali and Hanna kind enough to uh
[00:48:49] do you and I'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But first I wanna do
[00:48:54] another spotlight on On2Air.
[00:48:56] Our primary sponsor for the BuiltOnAir podcast.
[00:49:01] And what we're gonna do is on tear. One of is a suite of products.
[00:49:08] So we have multiple products I showcased are amplified product which is our
[00:49:13] editor that runs inside of Airtable. We also have a handful of products that
[00:49:17] are web based and run outside of their table.
[00:49:20] One of our main ones is our on tear action. That's a automation platform for
[00:49:26] running automation with your on table with your Airtable data.
[00:49:30] And we integrate with Zapier or Airtables automation or running it directly
[00:49:37] from a script or a third party application
[00:49:40] and have an A. P. I. That you can use to to call our Airtable are on
[00:49:46] their actions. And I want to showcase a new feature that that we've recently
[00:49:50] released which is our functions which are stand alone components or processes
[00:49:57] that are fully encompassed.
[00:49:59] And we have a suite of different um functions that you can install depending on
[00:50:04] what your needs are. They do a variety of different tasks
[00:50:07] and I'm just going to highlight one of them. That is our finance one.
[00:50:12] So if you're familiar, if you're coming from the Excel world,
[00:50:16] in the finance world, I work with a lot of clients in um finance and real estate
[00:50:23] and they're dependent on Excel primarily because of some functions that Excel
[00:50:29] has as well as google sheets
[00:50:31] related to financial formulas, financial calculations and Airtable doesn't have
[00:50:37] those. So we brought those two Airtable. So what you can do is you can create
[00:50:43] an automation and you specify when you want that automation to run
[00:50:48] based on, you select that the base and table that we're running it in
[00:50:52] and you can configure when you want that to run. It could be based off of when a
[00:50:57] checkbox is checked or unchecked when a date um and time hits um or a formula
[00:51:04] for now we're going to just tell it which record ideas that that we want to
[00:51:08] process it.
[00:51:10] And so then you just come in and configure your your function.
[00:51:13] And we have um most of the financial definitely all the common financial
[00:51:20] formulas that that you would need.
[00:51:22] Um President value, future value, payment, interest rate, principal payment rate,
[00:51:29] NPV and internal rate of return.
[00:51:31] So you pick the one that that you need calculated. And then it will guide you
[00:51:36] through. Depending on the formula that you pick. It will guide you through where
[00:51:41] to get the data from your Airtable base. So you simply just select which
[00:51:47] um fields are associated with the with the variable that goes into the
[00:51:52] calculation.
[00:51:53] So the rate field the number per or this one you can just set it here.
[00:51:58] Since typically that doesn't change on a per record basis. You can specify the
[00:52:03] payment field and formula which is you're familiar with an Excel requires it to
[00:52:08] be
[00:52:09] a negative number going in. So this auto negates it. So if you're
[00:52:14] value and Airtable is a positive number, you can click on this and it
[00:52:18] automatically make it negative before it goes into the formula.
[00:52:21] Or if you already have it as a negative in their table then you can uncheck that
[00:52:26] and then there's some optional values that help with the calculation the future
[00:52:31] value and then when to calculate it either in advance at the beginning or in
[00:52:36] arrears at the end of the period
[00:52:39] and then you come in and you specify where you want to store the answer to this
[00:52:45] formula function.
[00:52:47] So and the cool thing is is you can store it in two different places.
[00:52:51] You can store it as a raw number inside of a number, sell a number field and Air
[00:52:57] Table. And you can also use our formatting to format it however you want to
[00:53:03] format it.
[00:53:04] So I know our international customers are gonna love this.
[00:53:08] The ability to format things and international currencies is a huge plus.
[00:53:14] So it's very easy to set up different styles of formatting so you just click on
[00:53:20] this and you can create as many different styles as you want.
[00:53:24] And once you created here this would be available for all of our functions
[00:53:28] um to use for for formatting output.
[00:53:32] And now the format needs to go into a text field because it will add the
[00:53:37] currency symbols and the commas and things like that. So it needs to be a text
[00:53:43] field. It can't go into a number field. The number you can use for the raw
[00:53:46] number and then a secondary field for the formatting of it.
[00:53:51] And so this will allow you to create um currency styles or percentage styles,
[00:53:58] whatever makes sense. It has internationalization built into it.
[00:54:02] Um It has you can define how many fractions that you want display minimum and
[00:54:08] maximum so that you have a standard
[00:54:10] formatting. This is also used for uh some other form functions use units and you
[00:54:17] can convert units from one unit to another. Things like that.
[00:54:21] So very flexible on how you format your your output.
[00:54:26] So with that then you simply just have to save it and then I'll show you our
[00:54:30] sample base that just has um some sample numbers in here and we're going to put
[00:54:37] them into. I'm going to do it on this secondary record and you'll see it will
[00:54:42] put the answers into our answer rock and our answer formatted
[00:54:46] as we need there. So you go to the test function, select the api key that you'll
[00:54:52] be using. And then since we're in record ID mode, you do need to find the record
[00:54:58] idea of the record or records that you want to test with.
[00:55:02] This is a simple function that just exposes the record ID or formula and just
[00:55:09] exposes that and then just copy this value for the record that we want to test
[00:55:14] with.
[00:55:15] It was right there, paste it in and then hit test function
[00:55:19] and then we should see if all goes well, we see our raw number.
[00:55:24] So here's the raw number and then here's our formatted one. So I configured it
[00:55:28] for euros. So automatically adds the symbol and any of the formatting that we
[00:55:34] wanted. So we specified that we wanted
[00:55:36] a minimum of two decimal values.
[00:55:39] And so it has that they're so extremely powerful. Great for um financial service
[00:55:46] companies that want to use Airtable but are lacking these core functionalities.
[00:55:51] So check out onto their actions and our function library
[00:55:56] with the finance one as well as many others that can help you in yOn2Air,
[00:56:01] in your Airtable automation processes.
[00:56:05] So with that we're gonna move on to our final segment here.
[00:56:09] And Hannah and ali have been working in the meantime on a base that I gave them
[00:56:17] just at the beginning of this show. So they hadn't seen it prior to today and
[00:56:23] they are working on it and we're going to do a mini competition to see kind of
[00:56:26] what's going on
[00:56:28] and how they can enhance a base that they just got access to.
[00:56:33] That was pulled from the Airtable Universe.
[00:56:36] So while they're still working on that, I'm going to show you the base that that
[00:56:41] I gave them.
[00:56:42] So I pulled this from the Airtable Universe. And it's an event planning base um
[00:56:49] from this company insomniac that shared their base, you can check out this one
[00:56:54] as well as many others at their table dot com slash universe to give you a good
[00:56:58] starting point for anything that you're working on.
[00:57:02] And it's basically a staffing template. So if you think of any event that's got
[00:57:08] lots of people involved, this helps manage all of the event um staff and what
[00:57:15] they're working on and assigned to. So you've got your staff table of the people
[00:57:21] and their information
[00:57:22] positions. So the different rules that they have within the events
[00:57:26] um then you have your event that discloses um the events that you're working on.
[00:57:32] Each event is associated with a venue.
[00:57:36] Um And then they're hiring people for this to to staff up. And so they have the
[00:57:41] interviewers of who is performing interview. And then it looks like there's kind
[00:57:46] of a manager role for for uh managing the process. And this looks like it's uh
[00:57:53] the top level master role of everything going on.
[00:57:56] So that is the base that that they're working with. And now if we have a
[00:58:02] volunteer, anybody ready to to showcase first,
[00:58:05] ali I don't have much, unfortunately. I'm actually, yeah, your screen isn't up
[00:58:14] yet, so if you want to share your screen
[00:58:18] or Hannah, you want to go.
[00:58:21] Um Sure, I have just a couple of things.
[00:58:25] So
[00:58:28] okay,
[00:58:30] so I actually have planned some larger events over the past several years.
[00:58:37] Not not with this, many have been using this many volunteers.
[00:58:40] Um but the first thing that comes to mind is being able to communicate with them
[00:58:47] um by email or text. And so um you know, either sin grid or using the Twilio,
[00:58:56] that would probably the first thing I would do just to be able to communicate
[00:59:01] with everyone at once.
[00:59:03] Um because I think that's a main thing, another, you know that that's an app.
[00:59:10] Another app I would probably add as a summary and of the interviewers,
[00:59:15] I did the wrong table here, um but just to see how many we have,
[00:59:21] and then the next thing I would do is using this
[00:59:25] uh pre pre set up automation. The Airtable has of the weekly digest of how many
[00:59:33] interviewers we have uh when they're interviewing, just to get a digest of where
[00:59:40] we are either every day or every week.
[00:59:44] Um that those are a couple of things that I think would be really helpful in
[00:59:48] something like this.
[00:59:52] Awesome. So yeah, automation is I like the the app choice integrating it with
[00:59:57] text messaging, which would definitely come in handy in this kind of use case,
[01:00:02] so communication is key and having ways to communicate with the data is really,
[01:00:08] really powerful and their table.
[01:00:10] Thank you Hannah,
[01:00:12] let's go on ali what you got cooking? Uh Not much, I have to give it to Hannah
[01:00:20] this time, that's for sure. I noticed there were just a couple of fields that
[01:00:27] were
[01:00:29] um
[01:00:30] yeah,
[01:00:30] like this was not a linked record field, prior this was just a single select
[01:00:35] field
[01:00:35] um which seemed kind of odd to me just because the names of the single select
[01:00:40] options matched exactly what was already on the events table.
[01:00:43] Um
[01:00:45] So in general I always try and if I'm going to have a single select that has
[01:00:48] options that are the same as another table,
[01:00:51] I think just link it to the other table because that way you can start
[01:00:55] collecting lots of data. And also
[01:00:58] if you change the name of something then you only have to change it in one place.
[01:01:01] You don't have to go and edit your single select field after that.
[01:01:04] Yeah.
[01:01:05] And
[01:01:06] and that was true. There are a couple of places where that was true.
[01:01:09] So I started kind of just creating those new linked fields um and then you can
[01:01:15] kind of start to get a picture of the people that were interested in the event
[01:01:21] versus who actually worked it.
[01:01:23] Um
[01:01:24] And that was about as far as I got. And I also added a couple of pivot tables
[01:01:30] which I think are always fun.
[01:01:32] Got to have the paper tables. Very good. I think that's smart using the linked
[01:01:36] records. I mean you've got to have that to just pull everything together.
[01:01:41] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah that's a common, you know, when you look at people's basis
[01:01:47] of when is there a linked table versus
[01:01:51] versus. A drop down or multi select? So
[01:01:54] uh there's there's usually advantage, the one advantage I think to multi select
[01:01:59] is the coloring. If there's a way to color your linked records,
[01:02:02] then
[01:02:04] um
[01:02:05] then I would typically recommend
[01:02:08] setting up a super bass. If it's more than
[01:02:11] three or four, obviously if it's a small number, then it's not that big a deal.
[01:02:15] Right?
[01:02:18] That's about it. So yeah, so you got your charts um and your pivot tables
[01:02:27] and you can kind of get a feel of based out by language, how many events are
[01:02:31] going on by language?
[01:02:33] And
[01:02:35] let's see what's the top one By, by month. Okay, cool. So you can see
[01:02:40] by type and months. So that's a multi, multi variable pivot table.
[01:02:46] Right?
[01:02:48] And this is really cool, and I probably wouldn't do it this way unless I were
[01:02:52] filtering it to only show like this year, but I'm not sure if this is new or not.
[01:02:57] They just uh you can do month of year as opposed to months.
[01:03:01] So this will actually show the year in the month, but month of year will just
[01:03:06] show the name of the month, which is really, I think it just looks better,
[01:03:09] but obviously it's not helpful if you have data spanning many years.
[01:03:14] Yeah, so you can do that. I wonder if that works with um formulas that are
[01:03:20] formatted estates.
[01:03:23] Yeah, it does.
[01:03:25] Um
[01:03:26] Yeah, as long as it's a
[01:03:29] parsed as a date, if it's a data object, it will let you bucket it by whatever
[01:03:33] value
[01:03:35] comes in handy. Uh Very good. It's a good sense. So, nice. Friendly competition,
[01:03:42] let us know in the notes who's basically like they did with it or if you have
[01:03:46] your own suggestions on, uh, things that you like to see when you,
[01:03:50] when you first look at an existing base and rooms for improvement.
[01:03:54] So
[01:03:55] appreciate you guys participating. That's always fun to have a little little uh,
[01:03:59] little competition and and a little pressure to, to do something in a short
[01:04:03] amount of time. But you guys have a very short amount of time.
[01:04:08] You guys are pros and you did it well. So thank you.
[01:04:12] So that concludes today's episode and glad you could be with us.
[01:04:17] Feel free to check us out on
[01:04:20] BuiltOnAir dot com, join our community, join our slack community
[01:04:25] and see what is happening and we hope to see you next time and see what you
[01:04:30] build on there.
[01:04:32] Take care