Hacker News Reader

Airtable is not really that -- it does not do much/anything in the way of calculations or aggregations. I love it and it's great for creating very structured ways of managing data, but it can't do even very basic aggregations.

View on HN

Not entirely true. Airtable has formula fields [1] and it can indeed summarize columns, and even slice and dice using crosstabs [2].

[1] https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/203255215-For...

[2] https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/115013249307-...

This in principle accurate, but the real story is less polished. If you look through the AirTable forums, you’ll see lots of cases where users are asking how to do a thing, and are told to abandon the highly limited scripting and to use JavaScript. This is what I characterize as a learning cliff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com