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Comment by iancmceachern | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there are other things it does, but pragmatically every time I've seen Airtable used in business it's used in a way which a simple excel spreadsheet shared on one drive, Dropbox, box, etc. Would do.

Honest question, what does it do that excel does not?

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You have the wrong paradigm. Airtable doesn’t improve on excel - it makes databases accessible to non-technical people. It’s the new MS Access: simple GUI for doing Joins, lookups, foreign keys without knowing that’s what you’re doing.

This is true, in theory. However when we attempted to deploy it this way in our org, the average non-technical user was simply unable to grok the concepts of relational databases and we ended up with a complete mess that needed to be manually groomed on a regular basis.

This resonates. Still, even simple Excel spreadsheets shared on OneDrive often end up a mess and need grooming by someone with some common sense.

I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's seen the folder with:

- Master Job List v1.xlsx

- Master Job List v1 (1).xlsx

- Master Job List v2-new.xlsx

- Master Job List v2-new updated.xlsx

- Master Job List v2-new 2023.xlsx

And then you open it up and there are 7 different fonts, sizes, duplicate sheets with conflicting information, circular refrerences, macros that won't load, some VBScript from 2004 that no longer runs... and this is the document that the COO uses daily to run the entire company.

Everyone knows the correct filename scheme is:

- Master Job List v1

- Master Job List v1 final

- Master Job List v1 final final

- Master Job List v2 final

- Master Job List v2 final, short

- Master Job List v1 absolute final

The v2 ones are forward looking, the 3rd one down is the one the COO uses to run the company, and the last one is the one they use to do the taxes

Forms, email automation or page designer are just some example. My wife works for a niche RE agency and she created a whole CRM from scratch with Airtable. This was impossible with Excel.

This is a great example! Thank you!!

I built a CMS backed by it to build sites that are mostly data, but have a few text blocks and images, so since all the data entry was in Airtable anyway, moving the rest of the content there made sense and now lots of small dev tasks can be done with zero dev time (change gets made in Airtable, product manager triggers the CI build, CI build pulls everything from Airtable)

I guess an advantage is that it's a competitor to a single Microsoft vertical? So is Notion though and a few others. Competition is healthy.

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