At the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management we have lots of spreadsheets. We also have lots of duplicated data. We have sheets for people, offices, groupings of people, management of our space. We have simulated databases in our web site. We've started a journey to improve operational efficiency of our procedures and to make our data easier to access. We are using Airtable, a company that offers a SAAS product that can magically turn spreadsheets into databases. Data that has been locked in an excel spreadsheet on our file server, can now serve all or parts of the spreadsheet to the web, access optionally controlled with passwords. Common features such as filtering, grouping, sorting, having formulas in columns are all a part of Airtable. All record changes are recorded for auditing and you can easily create a "snapshot" of your database and export it to a new workspace for archival or auditing. A change to your data is instantly accessible on the web. No Duplicate copies!
During this session, I'll demo some key use cases and lessons learned in our staff learning and adopting this technology. I'll also demonstrate how we easily created reports/graphs and charts using Airtable by synchronizing data in a legacy web application to a "base" in Airtable. One use cases will include efficient on-boarding of visitors and having a live calendar view of when visitors arrive and depart.
I'll also summarize the key missing features gathered from the active community forum on Airtable.
I've been involved with software engineering, IT system administration at UCSB and numerous private industry companies for over 25 years. I'm very familiar with University academic business rules due to my work on our course management system and waiting list.
This just requires a web browser!