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Prototyping applications with Airtable

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Gotta say: using spreadsheet as poor-man’s database makes me feel poor every time. Google Sheets is so convenient that everybody starts a new sheet to hold some information in a table. The problem is, sheets are so convenient that some sheets keep on starting again, and again. Soon the company has 20 sheets holding bad information. It’s the tragedy of the corporate wikis all over again.

Instead I’m one of the few who used to love Microsoft Access: I know, it’s bad as a database but to rapidly prototyping small applications it was awesome. As a poor-mans database, Access was at least credit-worthy compared to spreadsheets.

Unfortunately Google doesn’t have something similar to MS Access so when I discovered Airtable, I got really happy. I’ve prototyped a small application to keep track of conferences and call for papers. Finally I don’t have to keep entering the same data every year in a new sheet and I can keep tables in fairly normalized form. Nice stuff. I wish Google Apps buys it … and the cynical in me says: “so we can have dozens of similar databases instead of hundreds of similar spreadsheets (the same tragedy, at a smaller scale).”



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