Transcripts
1. Introduction: When I launched my original Airtable class back in 2019, I wanted to help as many artists as possible improve their organizational skills using my very favorite app, Airtable. I have to tell you though, my obsession has only gotten worse over the past two years. What that meant was I just had to create a follow-up to my first class. In case we haven't met before, hi. I'm Shannon McNab and I'm a surface designer and online educator. I've been running my own design business for over five years. I've always been one of those strange people that loves to organize everything, so when I stumbled on Airtable back in 2018, it was a match made in heaven because I finally had one place where I could organize my entire business. Now, if you aren't familiar with using air I want you to pause this video right now and go watch my first class that covers all the basics of the app. Seriously, I'll wait. Because in this class I'll be covering some amazing, but more advanced features of Airtable like building forms from scratch, sinking between bases, and creating multiple views of a single table. If you haven't watched the first class, you may find this class overwhelming. On the other hand, if you're already an Airtable fanatic, you're going to love it, and by the end of class, be able to organize your entire creative business like I have. Let's get started because honestly, I'm too excited to wait another second.
2. How I Use Airtable Now: I thought the best place to start with this follow-up class is to talk about the differences between how I used Airtable back when the first class launched versus now. Because back in 2019 when Airtable for Artists first launched, my primary focus was just for surface design. But now I truly use it for everything. I still have my surface design workspace. But beyond surface design, I now use it primarily to run my educational business with the help of my virtual assistant, and so I have several bases dedicated to just that. You'll actually get to see behind the scenes of some of these in the second half of this class. But truly, the biggest change for me is that I upgraded my main education workspace to a paid plan. One of the annoying things about air is when you upgrade, you're only upgrading a single workspace, so you have to pay per workspace that you upgrade. Unfortunately, you can't do it for your entire account. If you are ever curious about what features are included in the different paid options, you can just go to airtable.com/pricing and it will show you the differences. Now, I will try and call out paid features throughout this class and show you the differences between paid and free versions. Those are the high level changes that I've made to my overall account. But I wanted to cover one very exciting feature that was not something I really knew about the last time I did the class and I wanted to make sure to share it right at the top of this class, and that is Airtable's restore feature. If you happen to delete something, say you decided you deleted something like an entire table and you didn't really mean to, so say this had a bunch of information. I'm like, I don't think I need this, so I go and delete it. You can see right here recently deleted tables can be restored from the trash. I'm going to hit "Delete", and then in a few days I'm like, oh, you know what, I actually needed some of that information. I would go to the little trash can icon and you can see right here, you deleted this table a few seconds ago, and you just hit "Restore". How much time you have to actually restore really depends on the plan you have. For a free account you get up to two weeks, which is actually I think pretty generous for a free plan. The plus plan, which is the $10 month version, is six months and the pro plan gives you one year, which to me is more than enough time. You can see it has reinstated that table. But there's also a way to restore an individual record that you deleted. Let's say I start with a new record and then I decide I don't need it, so I delete it. All you have to do is hit Control Z. It's basically undo, just like if you were using an Adobe program. If you forget that, all you have to do is go to this looks like a clock with a arrow around it and just hit the "Undo" button and then it will bring that back. Again, this is something I wish I had known two years ago when I did the first class, but now you know how to restore things if you ever need to.
3. Phone & Tablet Version: Before I get to the updates I've made to my surface design bases, I first wanted to talk about the Airtable app for phones and tablets. It's something I didn't really use much before the first class, but now, seriously, I use them all the time in so many ways. I've utilized Airtable to add items on my to-do list when I'm out in about and something pops in my head and I don't want to forget it or when I'm about to go to bed, that's usually when I get all my ideas flooding in to my brain and so I put them in the Airtable so that I can actually fall asleep. I also love to upload product photos for company research now directly in the app. This is something that I've added to my company and client base, and I will show you that in the corresponding video. But it's really great when I'm doing a little window shopping, looking for new companies and I come across products, I always take photos and upload it to Airtable. I've also used it when I need some info or a link really quickly. This happens when I'm talking with customers on Instagram or I'm doing research for something and I need to find a link. I use a lot. It's really easy to use Airtable for that. Again, a lot of times it's usually in the evening when I have my iPad when I'm sitting on my couch. Those are just a few ways I've used the app, either on my phone or tablet, but there are some very big differences between the desktop version and the app for your phone or tablet. I want to go through some key differences with you, and I will be demonstrating these on my iPad. The first big difference is there are limited view types. On the desktop, you have all the options available to you, but currently in the app, you only have the grid, gallery, and kanban view. Hopefully, eventually they will add in the calendar and form fields, but right now it's just not available. Next is adding new records and tables is a slightly different process. For individual records, you're going to use the giant plus sign at the bottom of your phone or tablet, and then for tables, you're going to use the small plus in the bottom right. Next, records can only be updated in an expanded view. Unlike the desktop where you can add information in without expanding an individual record, here you have to click on any record that you want to update and it will open to the expanded view and this is the only way to add information and edit it. Probably one of the biggest differences is actually adding or adjusting fields within a table. Just like on the desktop, you can move fields the same way where you drag and drop them, but adding them, there's actually two different ways to do that. The first way is to click on the field name next to where you want to add a field and then select, "Insert Left or Right". Or option 2 is to click on the table name itself and then customize fields. Then you would add in a new field. From this view, you can actually adjust any field setting here too. Then last but not least, scrolling through records. I find this not quite as easy as the desktop version. On the desktop, all you have to do is use the little up and down buttons in the top left corner when you're in the expanded view of a record. It's really simple. The app doesn't have those up and down buttons, so what you have to do is swipe up from the bottom of your screen. But you can't do it too forcefully because at sometimes means you'll end up closing the app, which I have done many, many times. It's just not as easy to scroll through the expanded view of records. I hope that gives you a better understanding of the differences and functionality of the app on your phone or tablet, and hope it inspires you to download the app to your multiple devices if you haven't already.
4. Portfolio Base Updates: Let's take a look at some of the updates I have made to my portfolio and contracts base, which is one of the most important that I demonstrated in the first-class. For comparison sake, here's what it looked like back in 2019, and here's what it looks like now. Right off the bat you can probably see there's one major difference, and that is the row height of each of my designs. This was actually something that was available as a setting back in 2019. I just didn't notice it was there. Now I'm going to share what I found and how helpful it is, which is row height. It's this little icon right here, and it gives you four different options. Short is the default setting that you're probably all familiar with, but they also have medium, tall, and extra tall. For this particular table, because so much of it is about the artwork itself, I love having the extra large row heights, because it was so hard back in the day to see which design it was from the tiny little thumbnail. Now I just have it huge and it's a lot easier to see. The next thing I'm going to show you is probably my favorite addition, that air added into the app since my last class, and that is multiple views. You can see over on the left-hand side, I have four different grid views. Back in the day before they offered this as an option, you could only have a single view of each type, so you could only have one grid, one form, one calendar, one gallery, and one Kanban. That was it. Well now you can have as many views of each type as you want. Back when you can only have one, I really leaned on the grouping feature a lot, which you probably recall from that first-class. But now I love to use the multiple views in the same way. Here I have a version that has my entire portfolio, absolutely everything, but then I have separate views specifically based on the status of the design. You remember, status was one of the columns, and it was basically licensed on hold or purchased. Instead of grouping like I did previously, I now have multiple views based on the status of a design. Now, how you actually go about doing this, I'm going to demonstrate. I copied my entire portfolio into a demo so I could show this to you. The first thing you're going to do is rename it something like all total complete in the name. Because the most important thing that I want you to remember when you're using multiple views, is to always have a view that contains absolutely everything in the table. Then from there, all you have to do is click the little three dots and say, "Duplicate View". Here we're going to do a license designs. All I have to do to update this is go to the filter feature, add a filter, and choose where the status is licensed. You can see it updated and now it's only the licensed design. Now, if you want multiple views that have very similar type filters, the easiest way to do that is to actually duplicate a previous view. For purchase designs, for example, all I would have to do is duplicate this one and then change the filter where status is licensed to purchased. That's all I would have to do. I hope your wheels are turning a little bit on how you can use multiple views and I will definitely be calling out in many later videos on how I've added the multiple view functionality to many of my bases. Let's get back to my Portfolio base and I'll show you the rest of the changes I've made. Let's go to buyout contracts. I did also make a change to this. Previously, this was purchased contracts and it included everything that was either a buyout or also all the freelance commission projects I did. But because of the changes that I've made and specifically to my projects calendar base, which you'll see in a later video, I actually moved all of those commission projects into that table. I change this to just be buyout contracts where the companies purchased a design outright. Last but not least, is clients. If you remember, in my last class, I had a paying clients table that included all of the information of each client that I worked with and how much I was earning from them and how many designs. Well, what I found was I was not updating it as frequently as I needed to because it was getting too difficult and time-consuming. What I decided to do instead was actually delete that table and replace it with a client's table that's actually synced to my company and clients base. Syncing is something that is fairly new to Airtable and it is amazing. I walked through how to use the entire feature and the syncing between bases video. But basically, what this does is pull all the information from my company and clients base, and then I can use that just like I use my paying clients where when I have a company field, it is linking to another record field type. If you need a quick refresher on how to use the link to another record field type, I highly suggest you go back to my first Airtable for artists and view the new bonus video that I added to demonstrate how to successfully create link to another record easily.
5. Companies Base Updates: Just like my portfolio base, I've only made a few minor changes to this since my last class and the first of which is something you probably already guessed is using multiple views. I have one that includes all the current companies that I've reached out to. But I've also created views to include both a list of those who have been clients and this illustrates one of the benefits of having multiple views because this company clients view is what's linking to the clients table I showed you that sinked inside my portfolio in contracts base. But then I also have a view of all the rest of the companies I reach out to that aren't clients. The only other change that I made was updating my notes and I've done this pretty much globally for all of my bases, is toggling on this option, enable rich text formatting and what that means is you can include links, have bullet points, have titles. It really helps if you have a lot of information on a company that you can organize it a little bit easier this way. Now let's talk about contacts. I've only made one little change and that is adding the frequency column. The reason is because I have so many people that I am contacting on a regular basis, it was getting to be a little bit too much trying to contact all of them every month, especially because some of them don't need to hear from me that frequently. I added a frequency column to adjust things on sending monthly all the way to yearly based on my previous interactions with all of these contacts. Now what that means is I'm not contacting as many companies every month, which means I'm spending a little less time with admin for this part of my business, it means I can spend that time elsewhere. Next step, I wanted to call out the product photos attachment I mentioned back in the phone and tablet app video. I have a product photos and attachment field and so anytime I take photos on my phone, I literally just upload them directly into the Airtable app. Now one final note, this isn't something I have added in myself, but it's a suggestion that was made from my course students and it's to include a field to help you decide whether you're going to contact a company or not. I have an example in here that I've added. To illustrate this is I just put it as match and the reason being is if you're doing a lot of research, especially online, you will probably encounter a lot of the same companies over and over and so you don't want to be redoing that research every single time because that would be a waste. My students suggested actually including every company name you've taken the time to research so the next time you go hunting for new companies, all you have to do is use the find view and start typing something in and you'll see if you've encountered them before. So you immediately know if they don't have the checkbox, that means it's not someone you need to spend any time researching. Again, this is just a suggestion, if you find that you're researching a lot of the same companies and use this as a way to differentiate between those you want to contact and those you don't.
6. Project Calendar Base Updates: Truly, the biggest change between my demo and my last Airtable class versus this one is my project calendar base. It has definitely evolved a lot. Just as a reminder here is what it looked like before. It was much simpler than what I'm going to show you now. First up, I changed the tasks column to call it project task calendar. Yes, you guessed it. I added in multiple views, just like I've done for the other two. Again, I have absolutely all tasks, a completed view. The filter here is anytime the done checkbox is checked and then progress, it's the opposite. These are all in-progress projects where the checkbox is unchecked. Another change to this table was I actually added a task type. This was to identify the different stages of each project process. I have brainstorming, sketching, design, revisions, Print Production, file cleanup and then client communication. This is really helpful because then I can see which task very easily is up next. That's the main changes I made to my tasks table. But I also wanted to call out something specifically in the calendar view. Another awesome piece of functionality that they added is if you go to the Share View and sync to an external calendar, you now can have all of your tasks added to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Microsoft Outlook Calendar. Since I personally use Google Calendar, that's what I have synced all of my Airtable calendars too. If you're not sure how to do that with whatever specific calendar application you use outside of Airtable, all you have to do is click this little question marks and it will open up all of the documentation and show you how to do it for each of the options. Next up is my project list tab, which previously was just called projects. You can see there are a lot of different fields here. I added a project details section and yes, enable rich text formatting is included. If you remember when I talked about the purchase clients and how I had removed the freelance projects from that table, the reason why is I now have a project fee field in this table. Then if it's a long-term project, I always ask for a deposit upfront to start the project. I also included a deposit received checkbox. After that, there are a bunch of different date columns based on the different deadlines of any given project. Then the rest are pretty similar to what was in the table previously when I demoed it. The one big difference is this last one, project type, long-term versus short-term. The reason I added this was so I could have long-term and short-term views. Let's look at those now. I don't currently have any outstanding long-term projects but this basically looks exactly like all projects because it has all the information there. But for the short term, you can see if I scroll over, there aren't nearly as many fields. The reason being is I don't need as many due dates or have a deposit check because it's a much smaller project, it's not usually something I ask for. Another functionality with multiple views is you can use the hidden fields option to further customize individual views. In this instance, you can see all you have to do is toggle on or off which fields you want to see and so I removed deposit received both the first and second round due. I love using the hidden fields view to hide things that aren't relevant to whatever current view I'm looking at. Again, it's another way to further customize multiple views. The next table is a completely new edition and it's one I think you're really going to enjoy. When you hear from companies that they have certain submission deadlines, like they're looking for Christmas in March but then they're looking for Valentine's Day in November, if you have those dates, it makes sense that you would have a place to store them. Well previously, I had a bunch of different notes all over my computer and then I realized, why don't I have all this information into Airtable just like I do everything else? I figured the projects calendar is the perfect place for it and that's why I actually changed the name to projects and submissions calendar. It's just themes they needed, the due date that they're asking for this submissions to be submitted by a cent checkbox and then all the company information. Company name, contact email, product categories and then ideas and notes. Now, one call out I want to make here is the product categories tab. Because you might notice this little magnifying glass and this is a field type I haven't previously talked about. It's called the lookup field type and it's a little bit more advanced. What's great about a lookup field type is it's actually pulling the information from the company on the company list table. Now, how does it do that? Well, I'm going to take a step back. First, you have to make sure that somewhere on the table before you add a lookup field is that there is a field type that link to another record. That's what this company field type is. Let me just for demonstration sake, I'm going to change this to single select real quick. You can now see the product categories disappeared because when I switched the company field from a link to another record field type to just a single select, this table no longer has a link to record to pull that information from. That's why it's crucial when you're using the lookup field type that you first create a field that's linked to another record that you'll be looking up additional information. That's why here the link to another record is the company and the lookup field is the company's product categories. If I go back, customize field type, link to another record and I'm doing company list. Now, it's returned. I'm actually going to delete this, so that I can show you how to create a new one. We're going to scroll down to look up and you can see this is why, so field on this table that links to the records you want to look up. We want to look up the products that the company produces. We want the company table and then company list table field that you want to lookup is products they make and then create field. You can see now it's working. Last but not least, I wanted to touch on again, the multiple views feature when you have specific dates in mind. Obviously, I have in all submissions again, you always want to start there but I also have a 2021 submissions. Let's talk about how I filter to only include this year's submission. The first filter is where the due date is after an exact date. That exact date that I chose was December 31st, 2020, so the last day of last year, anything past that will be included. Basically, starting with the 1st of 2021 and then I also added a due date that is before the 1st of next year. What I'm doing here is basically saying, include anything that falls between the 1st of January to December 31st, 2021 with these two filters. Now one additional thing that sometimes they like to do is filter out anything that I've already sent. Like I only want to see things that haven't happened yet, deadlines that are still looming. I might also decide to add temporarily a filter where the due date is after today. You can see it automatically updated and it will automatically keep updating. That's another way if you only want to see what's looming not what's also already happened in a year. You can add that filter, as well.
7. Syncing Between Bases: Hopefully you enjoyed and appreciated seeing the updates I've made to the bases that I showed you in the first Airtable for artists class. Now, we're going to start covering additional features that I haven't talked about before and the remainder of the class, we'll be demonstrating other ways to use Airtable. First off, we're going to talk about syncing. This is really exciting because artists have been asking me whether this was possible since my first-class launched. Until just a couple months ago, it wasn't. But air finally added a syncing feature where you can connect two bases at the same time. There's actually two distinct ways to use this feature. I'm going to go through both of those with you. The first is to me, the simpler of the two to grasp, and that is simply to copy the data of one table you've created into a different base. Let's say I wanted to copy all of my portfolio information into another table, maybe as I prepare for an upcoming trade show or something else. What I would start is I need to click "Share view", and it create a shareable view link. Now, this can be shared. But you also need to click this second toggle which says allow data in this view to be synced with other bases. You can see as soon as I've done that, additional options show up and specifically the sync feature. Sync this view to another base. I'm going to click on this and it's going to open up this dialog box. This is basically asking you where you want to move the information to. Let's say I wanted to put it in one of my previous trade show files. That would be my surface design archive. Then I would choose that specific base within that workspace. Let's go ahead and choose Surtex 2020. Now, here are two different options, and these are the two different ways to use this feature. We're going to first start with the second option which is just to copy this data into the new table. It won't be linked between where it originally was and where we're moving it. It will literally just be basically copy and pasting the whole table into this base in this workspace. I'm just going to click "Create table". It takes a second. Now, you can see it has put everything into the Surtex 2020 base. Now, any styling that you have in the original doesn't translate. The row height, for example, you can see it automatically did the default which is small, so I would probably go and redo that to extra tall. That's option one. Anytime you decide you want to move information from one into a completely different base or workspace, this is how you do it. Option 2 is to sync a table between two bases. This is when there will actually be a link created. Whenever you want to see the same information in a different base and you don't want to have to copy or paste the info and have to redo it all of the time. Like when I showed you my updates, my portfolio and contacts, and how the clients is a synced base and the way you can tell if a base is synced is it will have this little lightning bolt next to it. Then we'll have a little lightning bolt next to the icon of every field as well. You can see when I hover over it says synced. How do we actually go about doing that? I'm going to start the same way with share view. Since I previously had the share view link already created, I don't need to do that step again. I'm just going to sync this view to another base and click that. Let's say, instead of just copying the information into my surtex space, say I was planning for this here and I wanted my portfolio in there, but I wanted it synced so that anytime I added new artwork into my portfolio base, I could see those pieces already inside my surtex space without having to duplicate those records and add them in myself manually. We're going to do the same thing, archive and 2020 surtex. Instead of copy this data, we are going to use to create synced because it will be kept up to date as this data changes. Again, we're going to click "Create table". Now, you can see the little lightning bolt it is now synced. Again, I would probably go back, adjust the styling. Those are the two ways you can utilize the sync feature in our table. But there are a few limitations that syncing has that I want to make sure to mention here. The first thing I want you to remember is when copying or syncing a table, it only syncs the current view. In the instance where you have multiple views, it's always best to make sure you're on the right view. That's why I advocate for always having a view that has all designs because that means there's no filters, there's no hidden views, and all this information will be duplicated. Let's say for example, I accidentally was on my purchased designs view when I wanted to share. You'll also notice that I had to create a share view. There's a unique URL for actually every single view you create. But so let's just say I didn't realize I was on the purchase view but I was moving forward exactly like I did previously. You can see all that ends up here are just the pieces that were in that view. That's why it's very important before you copy or sync, is that you always have the view that's visible to be the view that you actually want shown wherever you're moving it or syncing it to. The next limitation is that you can only edit a synced base, the one that's actually linked from one to another from the original base that it's in. A good way to think about this is if you can see the lightning bolt, that means you can't edit it. Let's say I try and update the status of this. It'll give me a error message that this field is synced from an external source and cannot be edited. What that means is in order to make adjustments, I would have to go back to the original, change the status here, and then come back to the synced base and press sync now. Now, you can see it's been updated. Remember if you're having trouble editing, go back to the original place where the table was created. The next limitation is specifically if you have a free plan, you can only have one synced table per base. I don't know if you noticed when I tried to add in the purchase designs. You can see it only gives me the option to copy the data, because I already have a synced table in this space, so I couldn't have a second. Now, this is only for the free plan, for the pro plan, which is the one that I have for two of my workspaces, I get up to 20 synced tables. Most of the time you will probably be fine with only having one, but it's just something I wanted you to be aware of. Then the last limitation is another free versus paid version. If you have a free plan, you will have to manually resync the information. Where if you have a paid plan either plus or pro, it will automatically make those adjustments for you. Say I wanted to update a view of these pieces and then I would come back here and you can see they have been updated. All I would have to do is go up to the table name and press sync now. To me this isn't that big of deal, but it is good to get into the habit of once you've added information from the original one and you know that table is synced to other locations that you go to those synced tables and immediately resync them. There you have it. That's how you both sync and copy information into different bases.
8. Sharing & Embedding: Now let's talk about a few more features I wasn't able to cover in the first class, sharing and embedding. First let's talk about sharing. Why would you want to share info that you have in Airtable? Well, there's actually several instances where you might want to, if you have an assistant or a team, but maybe you also work with an accountability partner, and maybe you have a calendar that you want to keep track of on milestones for each of you. Likewise, maybe you have a peer group or you're planning a joint event together. I've known several artists who have done trade show booths together, and to me, Airtable is a natural place to have all the information in one spot for a bunch of different people. Then last but certainly not least, if you have clients and you want to give a little bit of extra communication, especially if you have in-depth projects, it might be worthwhile to share some of the information you've collected with them in Airtable. How many different ways can you share information in Airtable? There's actually three different ways you can do so. The first is an individual table, say I wanted to share my portfolio with a client or my VA, the first thing would be to make sure that the share view was activated, and if it wasn't, you'd know because it wouldn't have this little pink square around it. Each view has a unique URL and so all you would have to do is copy and paste this link. This is what someone would see when you share the table with them. You can see they're able to filter, and group, and sort so that they could maybe find information that they needed. Also, if you'd like, you can restrict access with a password. Say you wanted to use this to show your portfolio to potential clients, but again, you don't want this information to just be accessed by anyone, you would just toggle on the "Restrict access With a Password", type in a password, and then when someone goes to view it, they would need the password, and this is what it would look like. That's a great way to restrict access to just the person you send it to. Beyond table, the next level up is to share an entire base. Let's say I wanted to share my entire portfolio and contracts table with my BA. For that, I would go over here where it says "SHARE", and you can see here it's giving me two options, either workspace or base, but here we're going to choose base. You have two options here, you can either put in the person's email address and they will get an invite link or you can create a shared link that will give them access to the whole base, much like how the table link worked versus if you wanted to invite them by email, and that would mean that they wouldn't need an Airtable account themselves, and the shared base would show up at the bottom, just like you see here, "Bases Shared with Me." That's what that would look like if you invite them. The last option is if you want to share an entire workspace, which the easiest way I've found is to go to your account page, navigate to the one you want, and then click the "SHARE" button. Here for workspace, the only option is to invite by email, where the entire workspace would be shared with them in their Airtable account as opposed to by link. One last thing I want to call out is right over here you have a few settings on what type of permissions they have. If you want to restrict their access to just be able to comment or see, give them either the commenter or read only option, because otherwise they will be able to edit and configure things. Now, what if you decide later on that you've shared something but you don't want to continue sharing it? Well, it's really easy to disable that. For table, you just navigate to the "Share View," and then "Disable Shared View Link." For an entire base, you go back to the "SHARE" button, and then where it says "Shared Based Link", you change it to "Disable Link Sharing". Finally for workspaces, when you wanted to disable someone from being able to use it, you would have to remove them as a collaborator. That's sharing using Airtable. Now let's talk about embedding, which is basically where you add a specific view of a table to your website. Why would you use the embedding feature to add information on your website? Well, you could do a few different things. For the grid view, it would be a great place to have a list of resources or links that you want to share that people could access easily. For a gallery, this would be a natural place to maybe have portfolio browsing for your private portfolio on your website. I've also used it to highlight student art for one of the challenges that I've run in the past. For the calendar view, maybe you have regular events like craft markets to exhibit art or you teach in person. This would be a very easy way to embed a calendar onto your website so that people could easily see when the next event is happening. Then finally, my favorite is using the Form view, I've used this for so many different reasons, but the most common is client on-boarding or for hiring. I will show you exactly how to build your own surveys using forms later in this class. How do you actually go about embedding information onto your website? Well, say I wanted to include a art supply wishlist onto my website. First, you would need to go to "Share View", and create the grid view link again, and then instead of using the URL, you're going to click here, which is "Embed this View on your Site". It will bring up a snippet of code. If you use Squarespace or WordPress or Wix, anytime you use this, you need to make sure you're using a code block, and so I'm just going to click here and copy it. Then I have a demo ready to go with a code block in Squarespace, and just copy in the code, and you'll see it automatically populates. Now, one thing is if you want to restrict how they can view the information, you can toggle off the "Show View Controls" button, and now you can see the controls at the top have been removed. Let me toggle it back on. This right here gets removed, and the code itself does change. If I'd already placed the first one and then realized I didn't want to give people the option to be able to change the view, I would have to copy it and go back and paste in the updated code, and now you can see it was removed. That is how you embed things into your website. Embedding can be really great because it saves you time from having to duplicate information that's probably already in Airtable and adding that into your website. This way you just copy a snippet of code, and it's going to be immediately available.
9. Creating & Using Forms: Now, I'm going to talk about another one of my favorite uses of Airtable, and that's actually using their form view type to create surveys and questionnaires. First, I want to talk about different ways you can actually use the form feature in your table. The first thing is client or student on-boarding. If you're a graphic designer and you normally send a on-boarding form to your new clients, you could easily do the same thing by creating a form in Airtable, and what's great about it is it will keep all the information that you collect from all your clients in one space. Next up, customer feedback. This can be helpful for those of you who have a product-based business or a art-based business. Anytime I decide I want a little bit of information from my followers, I just create a form in Airtable and send it off. Next is a waitlist of some kind. It could be for an upcoming class you're creating, for coaching, or if you're planning a upcoming product launch. Having a place where you can gather all the people who are interested in hearing about it, makes it really easy so that when that happens, you have a list to pull from and immediately send that information to those customers. You can also use it for any type of submission, whether that's artists who are asking you questions, maybe in an upcoming class or Instagram or Facebook Live, or for me, I have a monthly recurring feature on my educational site blog that highlights upcoming artists. So I've built a submission form in Airtable to collect all of that information. Finally, client or student testimonials. If you've been an artist for awhile, I probably don't have to tell you how impactful testimonials can be for your credibility as an artist. If you have a place where you can collect all of those in one spot, again, your table form feature is a phenomenal way to do that. Now, that I've talked through the different ways you can actually use this, I wanted to demo how to build one from scratch. The first thing you have to do, obviously is create a new table for your survey, but we need to create a form view. But before I do that, I'm actually going to delete these extra fields because I'm going to be building everything in the form view. Now, I'm going to click on "Form". The first thing you want to do is name your form. Let's say I wanted to capture emails for an upcoming class launch. You can see it automatically changed it here in the title. Actually, if I decided I wanted to rename this to just class waitlist, you'll see it automatically updates it there as well. The next step is if you have information about the form that they're going to be filling out, you would add it here, "Add a description for this form". The next step is adding in extra fields so we can capture their email address. You would go to "Add a field to this table" and it will automatically bring up the field type. I'm just going to put in email address, change the type to email address, and hit "Save". Now, let's say I wanted the email address to be the very top of the survey and name to be after it. To move fields on a form, it's very similar to on a grid view where you just click on that field and then drag and drop it where you want it, just like that. Then moving down, you can also update the thank you message. Once someone presses the submit button, they would get a message, thank you for submitting this form. But if you wanted to change it to something else, you could just update this text. That's how you create the most basic of forms. But there's a lot more that this form can do. Let's do a little bit more customization. The first is, if you want to have a field that is required, so they have to answer it, otherwise they won't be able to submit the form, you just click on the one you want to be required. Then there's this little toggle on the right that says required and you just toggle that on. Next up, let's say I didn't need their full name. Maybe I just want to know their first name, I could go in here and make a change to the description text. One thing I wanted to call out here is when you update the description, it will not update the name of the field. If you want these to be exactly the same, it's always best once you've made the change to copy and paste in to the field, and see now they are both the same. The next setting is help text. Just like the description of the page itself, it's sometimes helpful if you give them a little bit more information for the specific question that you're asking. Maybe it's something where you need them to give you a response in full sentences as opposed to a one word answer, so you would just type in something like please respond in full sentences. Now, obviously that doesn't make sense with the first name. That's not something I would obviously include here. Now, beyond collecting a email address and name, maybe you also want to get a little bit more information from them when building this waitlist. Let's say you wanted to give them a couple of options to choose from. I would add a new field and then use either the single select or multiple select. Remember, a single select only allows you, or in this case them, to choose one option where a multiple would allow them to choose as many as they wanted. In this instance, I'm just going to choose, single select. Let's say I want to ask them whether they've taken a class for me before. The two options here would be yes and no. Now, when there are only two options, one thing I do like to do is update the colors so they are very different. Let's make this orange. You can see they now have two options. Now, one thing I prefer to do is have this as a list as opposed to a dropdown, which once you've made a single or multi-select field, you just click back into it and then it says right here show field as dropdown or list. I'm going to pick list, and you can see now it gives them the choice visually as opposed to having to click through the dropdown. Now, let's say I wanted to ask them another question based on their answer to this. If they answered that, yes, they've taken a class for me before, I'd want to ask a specific question and then if they answered no, I'd want to answer something else. Let's start with the yes. I would probably change this to long texts so they would have enough room to write. But because I only want this to appear if someone has chosen the yes, what I would have to do is go into this and see this show field only when conditions are met. I'm going to click that toggle on and then it will give you options, and so I like building these right after the question itself. It will automatically have that as the chosen option. Have you taken a class with me before and that condition is yes. You can see it updated right here to say conditional field, and if you hover over, it will show you the conditions that you've set. I also want to do the same thing, but for no, and so I'm going to go back, show when conditions are met. I want to make sure I choose, have you taken a class? This time it's no. Again, if I hover over, you can see it'll only show when someone chooses no. Now, I'm just going to add one more question to this. That is how you build a form from scratch and it automatically will create a share link for you, so you can just click on this and preview what it would look like. You can see that the conditional ones that we created for yes and no aren't there. When someone clicks yes, you can see it pulled that in, and then if I switch it to no, watch it change to the other question. But let's say I've decided that this is too many questions for them, and I don't want to include this one in the survey before I send it out. Instead of immediately deleting it from the form, what I typically do is drag and drop it into here, and you can see drag and drop fields here to hide. It will still leave in this table, but it won't actually be visible anymore, and that's in case I decide to add it in later, I can do it without having to recreate it. If I go back to the preview, you can see it's deleted it. You might be thinking, awesome, we're done. I know how to make a form, but there's actually one more step that I want you to always do before you send out this link to your customers. That's to go to the grid view and make sure everything is good. Because there is a very weird quirk when you decide to make changes to the order of the questions in the form view, it doesn't automatically change the location in the grid view. That's actually why I moved the email address to the bottom to illustrate this point. If I go back to the grid view, you can see it's right where we originally placed it, which was right after first name. You would have to go back in and drag and drop it to the last question. Now, this isn't a big factor if there are only a couple of questions that you're asking, but in a few instances I've had 10 or 15 questions surveys that I've sent out and if they're not in the right order before I send it out, I can get really confused when I go back to review the information I've been given from everyone who's taken the survey. Just remember to go back to the grid view, change the order manually to be exactly what you see in the form. I hope you enjoyed this demo on creating surveys. But one thing I want to make sure to drive home is having a survey is only good if you use the information. Now, since I don't actually have any information built into this demo, I wanted to go back to the Airtable survey that I actually created and show you a little bit more about how you can use the information and analyze the responses you've received. The thing I used most when I asked you what you wanted to see in this new class, was the different options you wanted to learn more about. I actually decided to filter based on that answer. What I liked to do was while I was creating the filter, was to look down in the bottom left and it will actually tell you how many records include that filter information, and so for creating surveys, which is video, 35 people wanted to hear about this. Then I would quickly toggle on and off to see how many people wanted each of these. Syncing information was super popular which is absolutely why I included it. That was how I decided what to specifically include in this class because I filtered and saw how many people wanted each topic covered. Now, let's say I wanted to target people based on how often they use Airtable. In that instance, maybe I would group them based on their answer. Grouping would be really helpful if you were maybe creating a waitlist or a database and you wanted to collect certain groups of people, this would automatically be an easy way for you to do that. The big takeaway here is, once you have created the form, make sure that you don't let that information sit. I always want you to go back and actually look through and analyze the responses you received.
10. Business Infomation: Now that I've gone through the updates of my previous bases and given you a little bit of information on new features. I have started using a lot. The rest of this class is going to be focused on additional ways you can use Airtable for your creative business because something that I got asked a lot from my students was basically just give me more, show me more ways to use the app. We're going to start with one of my favorites for my business, which is just business information. It's one base where I collect all the information that me and my virtual assistant use all the time. I'm going to walk you through how I've set this up. The first table is literally my most important info table. This has a ton of different information in it, from branding, to code, to copy-writing, to links. You can see on the left here I have many different views and I actually have this specifically because certain views are actually easier for me to find the information than others. Again, I always advocate when you build something like this to start with a grid view that has absolutely everything and then you can customize from there. First, I'm going to go to the important info view, which is actually a kanban view. Kanban it's not something I have really touched on in the past, but it can be really helpful in a number of different ways. What I like about the Kanban view in particular for this table is it's a much more visual representation of the information. Especially this first column here, branding, I use this all the time, and probably the most common thing that I use is the hex codes for my education business because I don't know about you, but how many times do you realize that you need a color from your brand color palette, but you don't remember exactly what that is? Of course, you can save color palettes in Photoshop and Illustrator. What about all of those non designed times when you need those colors? I just find it's so easy to keep one specific spot for all of the colors in my color palette along with their hex codes, and so anytime me and my VA needs this information, it's easy to find. Likewise, one of my other favorite things that I've added to this view is HTML and CSS code. Again, just like color hex codes, where I don't necessarily remember that information easily, I can't tell you how many times when I'm adding something to our website and I'm looking for a specific piece of code that I would usually Google every single time. Well, instead of doing that, I was like, "Why don't I add it into Airtable?" That's exactly what I did. Since this is the first time I've really showed you a Kanban view, I also wanted to show a few different ways you can utilize it. One is if you have a very in-depth project that you're working on, it can be really helpful, again, to have a visual representation where all the information you need is broken up into categories. For example, my pitch your portfolio course, I built it so that each module is its own stack of information. If I ever need to remember where a video is, I can come to this Kanban view and immediately see it. Then the last way I have used this, and this is probably, I would say the most common way people use Kanban is for the status of either tasks or projects. You can see here not started, written, recorded, edited, uploaded. This is actually for this class. You can see business information. This is the one that I'm working on right now. Once I'm done recording this, this will be moved into the recorded section. That's the nice thing about the Kanban view is you can literally just drag and drop things into the new stacks and it will update the information for you. Let's move on and talk about the other views. Links is another one that I have, and to me, the GridView is the obvious choice for having a list of links. I have all of these broken up depending on the type of link. For my website, for any newsletter, lead magnets, I have Instagram, Facebook. Any thing that you log into regularly like my Zoom meeting, I use that all the time or my Google Drive main link. All of these things, you can add a section just to keep track of all the links that you commonly find yourself going to. Then I also have an option for affiliate. If you're someone who likes to make some income from affiliating for products or companies and you want a place to store all the information, I highly suggest you build those links in your important info in Airtable. The important info table is not the only one I've built here. I wanted to show you the other ones that I have and why they're useful. The next one is Google Drive. I've started using Google Drive because when I hired a VA it was a lot easier for us to store massive amounts of information using Google Drive so that she could access it as well as opposed to it all being on my computer. What we found was it was a lot easier to have a place where all the links were stored inside Airtable because it meant we can immediately access it as opposed to logging in, finding the right folder, and so having a place where it's all together in Airtable with all of our other important information is really useful. Next is idea bank. Now this is specifically for my education business, but you can use this for your creative business as well. Anytime you have an idea that you think of, like I said, a lot of times I think of these when I'm falling asleep in bed, having a spot where you can immediately jump on your phone or iPad and add it in so that when you wake up tomorrow you don't go, "Oh, shoot. What was I thinking?" For Skillshare, for example, I'm always thinking about the next class I want to build, and so you can see at the top here, all of these are class ideas that I've thought about over the past year or two. If you're using this for your art business, maybe this is just an idea bank for ideas for designs that you want to add to your portfolio or your product catalog. Basically, anytime you think of an idea, put it in your table. Next is hiring, and I'm not going to show you that one only because there's a lot of personal information from people that have submitted their information to me. But it's basically if you ever want to hire someone and you want to collect the information of all the submissions you get, Airtable is a phenomenal place to do that. That's what this tab is. The last one and this is a recent addition for me is visual assets. I'm actually right now in the process of doing a slight update to my educational business branding with a graphic designer. I thought it would be really useful to have a place where we could store all of the visual assets. Once we're completely done with the brand refresh, this will be completely populated with all the imagery. If me or my VA ever need something, we can immediately go here and find what we're looking for. That's just some of the ways I've used air to collect the most important information for my business. I highly suggest if you find there are certain things that you go and look for time and time again that you consider adding a table, to collect all that information into Airtable so that you don't have to continue looking for it again and again and immediately can find what you're looking for very easily.
11. Business Calendar: Next up, I'm going to show you my business calendar. This is a little bit different from my projects calendar because beyond surfaces on projects, especially once I built my education business, I found a lot of my to-do. Items on my to-do list were outside of surface design, and so I wanted one calendar to be able to house all of my regular to-do list items. If you're doing things outside of freelance projects with clients, I highly recommend having a business calendar. Here is the first table that I have, which is my admin calendar. It is the thing that me and my VA share. You can see a bunch of different views, but the ones that I use most frequently is my calendar, which are specifically my to-do list items and then my VA Jena has her own to-do list. The way I'm able to create those different views is by using the Collaborator field type. Under Task Owner, you can see Collaborator right here. What's awesome, when you have a virtual assistant or a team or maybe a group project that you're working on. Having everyone in your calendar as a collaborator, really helps for communication between the group on every different task. Anything that I'm working on, I can immediately assign it to Jena, and it would switch into her view, so she knew that she was assigned a new task. Also one fantastic thing with calendar view is, the comment field. This is actually built into every single record you have in Airtable, but I primarily use it here for the calendar. All I would have to do is type in a comment. Once I hit, "Send," you can see, it's saying that my VA will be notified. She will actually get an email notification anytime I add a comment. The same thing happens when you switch them as a task owner. If I switch this from me to Jena, she would get notified that she now owned that task. Let's go back to the admin calendar. There's a few other things I wanted to call out. I also include a Google doc link and an Airtable base link inside my admin calendar, because anytime we have something that's related to a document or another Airtable base that we've created, it's fantastic to put those links in here. When I'm starting a new task or when Jena is starting a new task, we can immediately click on this link and start the task immediately instead of having to go hunt for that information. If you use a different app, maybe you use Trello or Asana, you could do the same thing. Then obviously, notes and end date. Another thing that we always include is an Images section. We don't always need them for every task, but when we do, it's really helpful because it allows you to share assets. Here, for example, we created a surface design survey at the end of 2020. Jena was tasked with creating all of the infographics for it. Well, what she would do is, every round, she would put a new set of images in here for me to review. What's amazing about this, is a new feature that Airtable added is, if you click on an image, if you wanted any updates, you can see these little boxes. All I had to do was drag and drop the section I was specifically talking about and then give her information on what I wanted changed. This is a wonderful way to record the changes you want very easily without having to use a secondary app or jump on a call and demonstrate it for them live. It's a real time saver. These image comments were exactly like a task comment. These will be sent to whoever is assigned to the task. That's the basis of my admin calendar. You might be wondering, well, what's the master calendar about? The master calendar instead of daily tasks, the master calendar is for any event. Meetings that I have, recurring tasks, big deadlines. You can see I have a photo-shoot coming up with my photographer. I'm going to be out of office. All these things to me, are really helpful to have in a separate place, still within my business calendar base, because then I can easily go back and forth to know when to assign tasks to myself or my VA. Now, one thing I did want to call out here is that my business calendar is part of a workspace that is on the Pro plan. What you're seeing here looks a lot different than what you will be able to do if you only have a free plan. The free plan, unfortunately, is very limiting when it comes to the calendar view. Here, for example, this is my projects and submissions calendar, I showed you earlier, and you can immediately see the differences. The first thing right off the bat, you don't have the option to add color, you have to upgrade to the Pro plan in order to be able to see multiple colors. Personally, I have found using color based on the task type that I'm using, to be very helpful. That is one negative about using the free plan. Then the other thing is you might notice, again, when I'm out of office here, it's on more than one day, but with the free plan, you can only have tasks that are on a single date. You can't actually build something that straddles more than one date on the free plan. Those are just two call-outs I wanted to make. If you're interested in using the calendar view, much like I have the master calendar, it might be worth it to upgrade to the Pro plan.
12. Email Marketing Calendar: The next base I'm going to show you is email marketing calendars. I probably am not the first one to say to you that having a newsletter for your creative business is incredibly important, especially because it's still is the best way to reach out to your customers and clients directly. But I also know that tracking all the information of your newsletters can be a bit of a pain, and I used to use Excel to house all of that information. But now, of course, I'm using Airtable. Since then, tracking the info has been a lot less of a pain, especially because I have two newsletters. The first is my art newsletter that I sent directly to art directors at companies, and my educational newsletter for my students in community. I'm going to show you how I created both of them. The first one I'm going to show you is the art newsletter because it is a much simpler version of an email marketing calendar. This base is pretty straightforward. I have a table to collect all my newsletter information, and then I have a separate table for all of my available designs. If you notice, it has a little synced lightening bolt, which means this is a synced table, and it is synced from my portfolio and contracts base. I specifically use the Available Designs view when I synced it, so it would automatically remove all of the purchased designs from that list, because obviously I would not be sending designs that have been purchased to companies. You'll see why I included this in a minute. The first field I always like to start with is the date, and one thing I like to do is actually have it sorted by the latest date first. The reason for that is when I go to add the next month's newsletter, let's say I'm adding in July, once I've added in the date, it will automatically move that to the top, which means it's a lot easier to view quickly. Next up is the subject line, and I always like to keep track of it just to make sure I'm not using too similar of words or phrases in the last few emails. The next column is the designs column. My art newsletters are pretty simple, they basically have a little snippet of copy at the top, and then I include three to four designs from my portfolio that are available to license or purchase. That's why I've included the designs column, because when I go to create my July newsletter and I decide what designs I want to use for it, I'll just click the plus sign and start typing in those pieces from my portfolio. You can see, as I was adding those in, it automatically pulled the images of those designs into the next column, which is thumbnails. The reason for that is that this is a lookup field. If you remember in a previous video where I showed you how the lookup field works, this is just another reminder that you need to make sure you include something that links to that table first, and then you can come and create the lookup field. I have this looking up from the designs column, and I'm pulling in the thumbnail images from that artwork. That's why if I wanted to put in a new design, let's say my autumnal owls piece, it would automatically make that change. To me this is probably my favorite way I've found to use the lookup field type. Then the last two fields are pretty straightforward, the first is a sent to. I do like to keep track of how many people are receiving my emails, and then also my open rate. That is the most basic, I would say, newsletter format in Airtable. This has been a wonderful addition that I've added pretty recently. I basically started it the middle of last year, even though I have been sending newsletters for over five years. I will definitely say this process has gotten a lot quicker. But like I said, at the beginning of this video, this isn't the only newsletter I send out regularly, I also have an educational newsletter that I send out to students in my community, and I will say that my educational newsletter is this table but on steroids. Now you see what I mean. I added a ton of additional information into my educational newsletter. You can see right off the bat, it is configured a little bit differently. Instead of starting with the date, I actually start with a campaign name. Now this isn't something I use for my art newsletter. Because I send my art monthly, I just name the campaign, the month and year that I'm sending it. But for my educational newsletter where I'm sending out at least one email a week, it's very important to have a campaign name. Now I use ActiveCampaign, for my educational newsletter. Because it's more than just me now, I have a VA who helps me a lot with sending newsletters, it's very important that we have campaign names labeled correctly so that we know exactly which newsletters are which. The next column is the date column. Just like with the art newsletter, having the date column is very important. But I also occasionally will send newsletters at specific times, especially during course launches, so I also include the time here. Now in order to add the time to a date field, all you have to do is click this toggle field right here, "Include a time field", and you can decide whether you want to be on a 12 hour or 24 hour clock. Next up is my segment column. Now for those of you who aren't very familiar with email marketing, segments are a great way to break up your email list and then send them more focused email campaigns. Now segmentation isn't something you necessarily need right off the bat if you're just starting a newsletter, but as your list grows, I highly suggest you consider it. The next column is status. Because it is more than just me handling my email list, we added a status column because I typically will write the emails, but my VA is responsible for scheduling the emails and then making sure they go out. The next column, again, subject line, just like my art newsletter, and then the following one is Link to GoogleDocs. This is very similar to how I use Link to GoogleDocs in our calendar, because we lean on GoogleDocs so heavily, and we actually create all of our email text directly in one document. One reason I specifically love using it for my newsletter is, if you create headings inside Google Documents, it will actually create a unique link, and so we do that for every single newsletter. I just copy and paste this URL. When my VA is going to create the email inside ActiveCampaign, she can immediately click this link and find the exact copy of the email she needs. Very similar to the art newsletter, the next two is Sent To and the Open rate, but I also include a column for click rate. It's not something that I find very important to me for my art newsletter, but it's extremely important for my educational newsletter. For those of you who maybe have a product line, or you're an educator yourself, having the click rate information is incredibly useful to you to know how well your emails are performing. The next column is unsubs, which is to track how many unsubscribes we're getting to each newsletter campaign. This is useful because sometimes you'll see unsubscribe rates that are higher than others, and that might also inform how you create future newsletters. Now one word about unsubscribes, these are not a bad thing, and no matter who you are, you will get unsubscribes. The more people you have on your list, the higher your unsub rate will be, and that is okay. That is how my education newsletter is configured. Again, I know this was a lot more than my art newsletter, but I wanted to show you the simplified and more complex version, so you get an idea of what pieces of both would work well for you and your unique email situation.
13. Marketing Analytics: The last base I've decided to share with you is my marketing analytics base. Just like email newsletters being important, so is tracking your marketing efforts. Because if you don't track the stats of the different marketing channels you use, at least on a monthly basis, it'll be hard to know how well each channel is working for you. Because I'm such a big believer in goal setting, having a way to track my growth over time and be able to set more realistic goals for myself down the line is incredibly helpful. So on the first of every month, I spend an hour to cataloging the stats of each major traffic avenue that I use. For me, what that means is, first and foremost, my website, next is my e-mail marketing, Instagram, because it is by far my favorite social media channel. Now I also have a Facebook group, and finally, I also like to track my Skillshare numbers. That's my list of marketing channels so that I track. But just because that's what I use doesn't mean that's what you use and yours are probably going to look a little bit different than mine. Maybe you want to track LinkedIn or Pinterest metrics, that's totally okay. I just wanted to give you a starting point to show you what's possible. I include a lot of the same information for each table. I figured it would probably be best not to overwhelm you with all of them and just show you one, so here is my Instagram table. The first column is the written out month and gear, and the second column is a date column. You might be wondering, why do I bother including both? Well, I include the written month because it's much easier to read, but I need the date column in order to use a pro feature functionality that I will show you at the end of this video. Alternatively though, if you wanted to do a date format that had the month included, you could do that instead, I just prefer to have both. The next column is channel. This is probably something that you won't have to use. I personally at this point, have two separate Instagram channels. One is my sketch design, repeat Instagram, and the other one is my personal Instagram. I like to have this included, so again, I can have multiple views for each. Next up is pretty straightforward. It's the followers field. The first of every month, I will go into Later and whatever it tells me what my number was for May 31st, that is what I would add in. So on the 1st of July, when I go in to add June's numbers, I would log into Later, see what it was showing me in the analytics and type in that information. You'll see when I add in that information that these two columns to the right will automatically update, and that's because they use the formula field. Now before I go over that, I do want to mention one field that I have hidden, and that is the last month's follower number. It's because I need to pull last month's number in order for the function fields to work properly. I usually copy and paste last month's number into the appropriate column where it says last month's followers. I just like to keep it hidden as opposed to out because it's just a little bit more clean, and you can see when I did that, it made a major change to the functions and now it's working properly. I do want to mention before I talk about this that I only recommend formulas for very advanced Airtable users. Because to be completely honest, I still don't completely understand the more intricate formulas and have even on occasion asked my husband for help because he was always an Excel function spreadsheet knack so I had him actually build the percentage field, but I can show you how I created the number field. I'm actually going to delete this and then redo it. The first thing is I need to find a formula, and because we're just dealing with numbers and not percentages, this is fairly straightforward. if you want to dip your toes into using the formula field type, this is what I suggest because the number that I am looking for is this month's followers minus last month's, because I want to see how many new followers I have. To do that, I'm going to find the followers because that is my current number and click on that field and then minus last month's followers. This is why it's so important to include the last month followers as part of the table, and then press "Create Field", and that's how you recreate it. Now you may be wondering, well, the number is here in May's followers, why can't I just pull that number into the function for June? Well, that is one major difference between how Excel works and how Airtable works is you have to have everything completely contained in a single record. That's why I have to basically duplicate this information in as last month followers, and so that's why I included this as a separate thing because you can only do a function based on the information in a single row. Now functions the thing I am trying to get more familiar with, and if you would like to learn more about how to build your own formulas, I have included in the About section of this class a link to Airtables resource guide specifically about formulas. Let's move on. The remaining fields that I have here are all based on the information that Later provides. So depending on what analytic information you have, you might not have all of this. But for me, I like to track as much information as I can. So that means reach, impressions, link clicks, profile views. Then anytime I'm provided with visual data, I find it really helpful to also include an attachment field. In the case with Instagram, one thing that Later does at the bottom of their analytics is it gives me the five most engaged posts of that month. I always find it really useful to screenshot these and then upload them to Airtable, because when I'm building future Instagram posts, I like to look back and see what posts are having the most impact, and a lot of times it can be really helpful if I have all of that historical information here. I do this also for my website stats because I get monthly emails from Google Analytics. So I think it's really helpful to screenshot and upload them here because I don't want to have to sift through a ton of different emails to find that information, and so at the end of the year when my VA and I are doing a recap and planning the next 6-12 months, we can easily find the information we need. One one thing I wanted to show you is perhaps my number 1 favorite thing about being on the Pro plan. It's probably the reason I finally decided it was worth paying for, and that is their apps feature. With Airtables app feature, you can include a lot of different information inside your bases, and I have found this especially helpful for the chart, which is what I love to use it for my marketing statistics. I'll pull this out here, and you can see I've created charts for my Instagram followers and my Facebook members, and I actually have several versions of this, so I have another one for website and email marketing and Skillshare. Because I'm such a visual person, I love using charts. Let's say I wanted to update the number for June, watch this after I've made the change. It automatically updates it based on the information. Having apps isn't an absolute necessity, but if you're a very visual person and plan on using Airtable for the long haul, it might be worth it to upgrade to the pro plans so that you unlock this feature.
14. Thank You + Your Assignment: Okay. I know we covered a ton of possibly new features inside Airtable, and honestly, I could go on and on about how to use it. But I hope you enjoyed this class and everything I shared with you here, and are excited to implement some of what you learned today into your own Airtable account, and with that, let's get to your assignment. I'm giving you two options to choose from. Option 1, is to revisit an existing base that you've already built and make adjustments to it based on the new features I've shared with you in this class. Option 2, is to create a brand new base modeled after the ones I demonstrated if you know what information you'd like to organize in your business next. Then take a screenshot of your base and post the image to the class using the Create Project button under the projects and resources tab. Remember, if your base contains any sensitive information then you block it out or blur it on the image before posting. Again, I really hope you got as much out of this class as you did from my original air for Artists class. If you'd like to chat more about how amazing Airtable is, the best place to find me is on Instagram @sketchdesignrepeat. Thank you so much for joining me and I can't wait to hear how Airtable has improved your creative business. Take care.
Shannon McNab, Surface Designer & Illustrator
