One of the things that keeps people from enjoying the benefits of automation is simply not knowing what's possible. While helping a client with their marketing, I noticed they were spending a lot of time and effort trying to manage a huge project with hundreds of stakeholders inside a Google spreadsheet. I showed them what it could be like and we added a project to make it happen. This is the result. 

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Computer Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] Are you still trying to make Google sheets and Excel spreadsheets do the job of a database. I'm Kronda. Adair. And I'm a Certified Automation Service Provider™ and the CEO of Karvel Digital. And today I want to share a case study with you where I helped someone who was trying to manage a huge complex project in Google sheets.

[00:00:19] And I helped them move over to Airtable and I'll show you what's possible and why you should consider ditching your spreadsheets for Airtable. All right. This project. This was a client of ours who was managing a huge project where the client had a number of different sites and classrooms and partners and volunteers. All these people and their spreadsheet when they shared it with me, it was one of those spreadsheets where you look, and there's like a ton of data in one cell.

[00:00:49] There's all this data crammed into one cell. So even if you wanted to filter it you couldn't right. You can't really manipulate the data and you can't automate the data because there was, it was totally miss structured inside the spreadsheet. And so when I looked at that, I just started I literally took the spreadsheet and I put it on one side and I put Airtable up on the other side.

[00:01:11] And I just started showing them like, Hey, if you structure the data this way, here's what you would be able to do. You would be able to filter, you would be able to manage the data better. You would be able to create interfaces to show you. Data that is important to you about this project.

[00:01:25] And so I want to take you through, I have a demo version with all of the personalized data removed and want to take you through and show you just a little bit. What I did was I I interviewed them and I looked at the spreadsheet to understand the hierarchy of what they were managing. And so on top of everything was the sites the actual places where these programs were taking place.

[00:01:47] So that was the first table that I constructed. And then all of the other tables were constructed around groups of things that needed to connect back to other information. And so [00:02:00] you have sites, you had. Regional coordinators and those coordinators were attached to certain sites. So you can see. In this column here it's literally a column that is linked back to the site's table and that way people can be, or coordinators can be attached to multiple sites. And then you can Sue, you can group them by what sites they're attached to.

[00:02:25] You can filter them, all that good stuff. Then you have the site coordinators. The site coordinators are attached to the sites as well. And the site coordinators are who they reach out to see who is going to participate in the next year. So we have a participation year. And I could see if you wanted to look at, If you wanted to look at coordinators and how many years they had signed up to work with you, you could create an interface to show you that. Then at the next level there's volunteers.

[00:02:54] With the volunteers they need to manage. How many people have they reached out to, to be volunteers who's accepted, which sites are they going to be connected to? Which is here. So you can connect a volunteer to a site as well. And then the volunteers go into schools and give presentations.

[00:03:13] And so all of the things about the volunteer or all the things about the schools are in their own table and everything that they need to track. What grades does this school serve? How many classrooms does each school have to work with? How many partners are going to be attached to this school?

[00:03:30] And then there's some kind of task management project management fields where they can track, Hey, have they identified? This partner, has this partner confirmed that they're going to be working together for the next year. All those kinds of things. And then the rest of these the interactions and notes this is a very simple CRM where they're able to track conversations that they're having, as they're reaching out to all these people, they're reaching out to the volunteers, the site coordinators, and they're able to [00:04:00] track those conversations and And so if multiple people are working on the project, they can come in here and know, okay, here's the last interaction that we had with people. And this field here is actually a roll-up field that will roll up multiple conversations with the same person.

[00:04:16] So you could create a view. If I was going to enhance this, I would create an interface where you can say, Hey, show me all the interactions I've had with this person or this school or the site coordinator. And you can be able to look at that in an interface and track that whole conversation. And then if they need to manage tasks, Then, for instance, following up with a certain person or making sure site coordinators, volunteers have their supplies.

[00:04:43] I gave them a task tracking. Table here. And so all of these things are connected no longer. Is it all just dumped into one flat spreadsheet. Now it's in a relational database where they can manage it better. And your spreadsheets can never. Your spreadsheets could never And then one thing that I would, if I was gonna go back and enhance this I would actually create if we look at the classrooms, one thing that they're tracking is in these classrooms, they have the estimated number of students. And then they need the volunteers to come back and report on the actual number of students.

[00:05:21] So the confirmed number of students. In order to be able to do that without giving everyone access to the database. This is where I would pair this with something like FillOut and use that to give people a way to update the existing records. So I've created a demo of that here, where. If you click on, you could create a shared view of this that was public with just the limited information and the button to confirm the number of actual students.

[00:05:50] And that would open a form that. Is an update form. So it's automatically filling in all the data, the partner, the teacher, the classroom, and all they have to do is say, [00:06:00] Hey, we had a 37 confirmed students and write any notes that they have and hit, submit. And then that individual record. Is then updated in the database. So there it is right there.

[00:06:13] So that's just a quick demo of one use case where we took an Excel spreadsheet, made it into an Airtable base that really saved the client so much time and allowed them to manage the product, the project so much better. I'm curious, what are you managing in your Excel spreadsheet? Spreadsheets.

[00:06:31] And let me know in the comments below, tell me what you're doing with your Google sheet, and I will tell you how it can be better in Airtable. Alright, thanks for listening. If you have a project, if you have a spreadsheet and you're like, Ooh, I would love for this to be an Airtable, hit up the link below.

[00:06:45] You can tell us what your task is. We can let you know how much it would be for us to actually just take that off your plate. Give you a nice Airtable base that you can run within your business and manage your projects better. Alright, thanks for watching. If you liked this video, don't forget to click all the subscribing and the likes and the, what to do.

[00:07:02] All right. See you next time.