I tried out Airtable for a year, for a simple personal spreadsheet that I’ve been keeping for a few years now.
It’s slick, and quick to enter data, but in the end I’ve decided to go back to Numbers.
Yes, boring.
Things I liked:
- I really liked being able to easily add images when needed
- Having single-select and multi-select lists are useful and intuitive. I miss this the most in Numbers.
Things I didn’t like:
- To do something as simple as making a little chart, I needed to pay $20 a month! Yes, the Pro plan had far more than charts, but I just cared about this one small feature, and it seemed ridiculous to me.
Things I didn’t care for:
- I realized I wasn’t going to use the 3rd party Airtable plugins or integrations.
- There is an intermediate Plus plan ($10/mo). I expected to use it, and would’ve been okay with it, but surprisingly didn’t hit the size limit on my bases.
Adaptations in Numbers
I was able to get most of the way to a single-select box by a combination of
- Setting the data type for the column to “popup”
- Adding a conditional highlighting (this is surprisingly easy to do)
Conclusion
I’ve always been one to try out new apps, and new tools, because there are always ways of doing things better, and the satisfaction that comes with that.
Recently though, I’ve been very sensitive to my personal info becoming siloed in a bunch of different places, and I want as much of it as possible
Moving from Airtable to Numbers involves giving up a few features, but it satisfies these requirements I’m placing on my tools these days, so I’m quite happy about it 🙂
Originally published at http://abacusnoir.blog on November 3, 2020.
