An Ad for Airtable popped up in my Facebook feed about a year ago, tried it, didn't get the hang of it. A change in Business circumstances (fellow Director leaving giving me more freedom to change things) meant that I revisited it. I now use it for so much where I would have used Excel.
It doesn't replace the number crunching aspect of Excel, but to give you examples of what I use it for:
I run a training Company. I would have a list of courses (dates, status, payment status and so on), trainers (name, qualifications, contact etc), course types. For each new course I would add a row and populate it. Always tricky to make sure formatting and references followed.
I also trade First Aid consumables so need to manage stock.
I Teach, so have a checklist for equipment to take with me depending on the course I teach (Workplace courses don't need paediatric Annies for instance).
Al this functionality is now on Airtable. It (as it proclaims) is a cross between a Database and a Spreadsheet. You create a sheet with everything on, then use 'Views' which is a very easy way of creating a Report. So, for instance I can create a View of courses by date, or by status or by Client that hasn't paid (effectively sorting by columns, however they are all 1-click available, whereas if you sort by a column in Excel you then need to resort to see a different view. Yes, I know in Excel you could probably create new sheets with the different views and the data linked across but it's quite an effort and I never trust that all my links are correct if I insert / delete rows in Excel.
Columns can be defined as a wide range of types - text, checkbox, links to other tables. Views can filter out unwanted columns, be sorted by one or more columns, grouped and colour coded.
Anyway the upshot is that if anyone is looking for an easier way of manipulating lists than Excel & doesn't want to use a pure database take a look. The Free version is pretty generous. but I've upgraded to the paid version which is not unreasonable ($144 pa) for the time it is saving me. First Aid qualifications last 3 years and trying to send reminders out via my spreadsheets from 3 years ago is laborious. I'm looking forwards to two years time when the Airtable ones come up for renewal. It will be a doddle in comparison. Set a column for renewal status, pull out client names / emails etc.
No connection apart from being a happy customer,
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https://airtable.com/