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I feel quite comfortable in Excel - used various tools like Power Pivot, Power Query, OLEDB, created my own functions, Python within Excel, etc. - but Airtable felt so confusing and limiting. Other former colleagues also struggled with Airtable; maybe it was not explained to us correctly.

I’ve used Airtable a bit. I think it’s really cool and would like more people to use it. However, it’s a lot more clicks and key presses to get things done - especially data entry - than in Excel. This also makes it better, since you can put constraints on tables, for instance.

You are absolutely right about needing more clicks and key strokes in Airtable. You have to reach the pain threshold in order to look for alternatives to Excel. And how soon you reach the pain threshold depends on how big your data is and how many users are trying to modify the same data at the same time.

See here to understand what you are missing out by not using a database: https://visualdb.com/comparison/#integrity

NocoDB is also a self-hosted option. I used it to power a family project that required regular API access, but without the rate limits of Google Sheets.