Best Microsoft Excel Alternative in 2017 is Airtable!

For spreadsheets and collaboration online, what works better than Microsoft Excel for me as an entrepreneur online today?

I love Microsoft Excel, but I'm showing you today Airtable because I like Airtable even better than Microsoft Excel because it's easier to collaborate with.

Read this post or watch the original video from YouTube to learn how I use Airtable in my business daily.

Best Microsoft Excel Alternative in 2017 is Airtable

Microsoft Excel is a program I've been using for 15 plus years and here's something that I do in it that's one of the most helpful spreadsheets I've ever made.

In this spreadsheet, I track the work I do each day. I track the number of audio files, number of videos I upload, number of messages, and then I put the exact project that I'm doing in here with it, and I track each of these by days.

This is an example of something Microsoft Excel is extremely helpful for. Yet, when I do it in Airtable, this is even easier.

In Airtable, I've got my "Diary."

When I click on "Diary" I can then see a spreadsheet that I was easily able to copy and paste from Microsoft Excel.

The difference in Airtable is that some of the things I want to do anyway are automatically done. In Microsoft Excel, I had to create formulas to make the second row at the top and calculate the "Total," and this is automatically done over in Airtable.

I can even switch these up however I want to. I have the Sum, I can put the Average down here for example. I can just easily switch that to an Average, and then switch that back to a Sum. I can switch all these over to averages if I want to.

This is so easy down here, you can even put things in like Standard Deviation. You can put in things like the number of Empty's or you can put in the Max.

This is easy in Microsoft Excel in theory, but in practice, you think, “Well I should be able to just set up a simple formula.” Well, you've got to manually do all these and I'm sure there are things I don't know about in Excel.

This is even easier in Airtable.

Now, this is not where Airtable really shines though, because this is nice having this spreadsheet on one computer, but what if I want to update this Microsoft Excel spreadsheet when I'm over here using my iPhone?

What if I want to just quickly add an entry at the end of the day without having to turn on my computer and load up this spreadsheet?

What's amazing about Airtable is that I'm able to access this on everything. I can get to this on my iPad, on my iPhone, on my laptop and on all three of the computers I have in here just as easily.

Now, with Excel, the problem is keeping track of the file. When I want to use the file on more than one computer, then I need to have something setup like iCloud Drive, OneDrive, or Google Drive.

All of these are good, the problem is what if I'm traveling and I just want to update my spreadsheet?

Then I've got to sign in to my iCloud Drive from somewhere. Or If I'm on my Mac and it's not connected to the Internet and I make a change on the spreadsheet here, but then it doesn't update on the iCloud Drive, then all of a sudden I've forked my spreadsheet. I've got two different copies of my spreadsheet, which is annoying when that happens.

However, this even is not the very best feature.

This is a nice feature of Airtable to do that, but what I like best about Airtable is the collaboration. This has taken my collaboration to a whole new level. I started this off with my friend Joe Paris, I'm doing some ad campaigns for him. We initially were awkwardly sending spreadsheets via email, which was quite annoying because every time he'd update something then I'd have to change the file.

Airtable really shines in collaboration.

What I'm doing now is I'm using Airtable for all my collaboration online. My friend Michel Gerard is helping me with my Steemit posts. We have a sweet system that we're able to use here to get everything done.

What I do in Airtable is I post a Steemit post title, I put my YouTube video, and then I throw a GoTranscript in here.

This is a feature that at least I don't know how to do it on Excel.

You can literally drop an attachment from a Word document, which I've put in this one or you can throw pictures in as you scroll over further. I can actually drop thumbnails in here. I can then directly make post links over here, and then I can add comments.

Here's another sweet feature, I've got different statuses that we can change following the work's progress. I've got this spreadsheet over here and you can see that there are different statuses on it.

If I turn this status over here to "Posted," this entry will actually then hide within the spreadsheet.

I will just show you real quick what it looks like on this one.

Let's just say I'll try it on this one, I hit "Posted" on here, you see that it says, "Record filtered." Now, if I change my mind I can put it back.

This allows us to keep a very simple clean interface while maintaining all of our data.

This is the most amazing thing I've seen for collaboration online since emailing and being able to do videos. With Airtable you are able to collaborate, get things done and you can use it for anything you do online whether it's blog posts, videos, ad campaigns or event management.

There are all kinds of templates in Airtable that they want to show you. If you go over here to "Templates," it will bring all these different things up like Advertising Campaigns, Launch Calendar or Project Tracker. They have a ton of different templates that are really helpful.

Once you get a nice template setup, it's extremely easy to collaborate. Instead of sharing spreadsheet files back and forth, then you just work in the same interface and everything saves instantly.

If you're thinking, "Oh man, this is so good, this must cost a fortune."

That's the best part. I've not spent a dollar on this yet.

I'm using this for free to collaborate with three different people online.

My friend Albert is working on these "Upvotable" posts that we're doing with Steemit. I'm collaborating with Albert to be my right-hand man on Steemit.

I'm doing ad campaigns with Joe Parys.

Then you can see my collaboration with Michel Gerard who uses videos like this one on this post with a transcription I get done through GoTranscript, then he edits it and takes screenshots, and gets them ready for a Steemit post.

I'm collaborating with three different people on three different projects all effortlessly in the same interface.

Then, I put my YouTube videos up, I've been using this to make the descriptions. I've even got a nice filter I can apply right here. You can see all these videos I've already done.

It's nice because if something were to happen to my YouTube videos, I'd really hate to lose all of this work with the descriptions. I write these long descriptions with an incredible amount of detail.

I've got an automatic character counting tool here so I know not to go over. Then, I've got all the videos linked right here as well.

Along with collaborating, I've got everything in one interface.

Then I can just use a filter in here. I can put the filter to "is empty" and I can actually hide all those old video descriptions that I don't need any more, so I can just put the newest descriptions.

I've got my key business tasks all in Airtable now, which means I can access them easily on any device. I'm finally saving some energy doing this because in Excel it just would have been too annoying to do it. It's so easy to set these things up in Airtable. I now have this one simple interface and it’s got all these critical tasks for me in a very small place.

I've got all my data Steem records in here. I've got these posts I've made, my rewards, my investments. I've got all these key things about Steemit in this one place.

I'm very grateful that my friend Jordan Arsenault invited me to Airtable.

I still haven't paid anything using it in a couple of months now. The price is one of the very best parts about Airtable because all the things I've shown you are available totally for free.

Nothing I'm doing so far is paid.

You see, you get unlimited bases.

So what is a base?

A base is each of these different tabs here. I've got the tab with Michel Gerard that's one base. Then the YouTube videos, that's another base over here. Therefore, I can make as many of these bases as I want to.

I can have up to 1,200 records per base, which at the rate I'm going, it's going to be hit reasonably soon.

I can also have two gigabytes of attachments per base. I've got these thumbnails over here on the base with Michel and that counts for my attachment space on this base. So that's just per individual base and I'm probably going to start hitting that soon.

Then you can have two weeks of "Revision and snapshot history."

That means for the last two weeks, if I go mess something up, I can go back to check and say, "Oops, I didn't mean to delete that or I didn't mean to edit that this way."

You've got two weeks of revision and snapshot history then. I haven’t even had to upgrade and a lot of users may not even need to upgrade for a year or more using Airtable, because if you're not putting that much data into it, there's no reason to upgrade.

Now, the awesome thing is that you can upgrade to just $10 a month with the annual plan, which this is probably the next upgrade I'm going to do. It expands to 5,000 records per base and it gives you another 2 1/2 times the attachment space, so 5 gigabytes of attachments per base, and 6 months of revision history.

$10 a month is an outstanding value. If you chose the monthly plan, it's actually $12 a month.

On the Pro account here then you can get 50,000 records per base, I’ll probably need to upgrade to this in a year or so, and then you even get priority support, custom-branded forms, and more colors and styling options.

This is an incredibly cheap tool and incredibly effective, which is why I've taken the time to share it with you today because this is one of the tools that helps me out the most online.

If you would like to join Airtable, would you please use my link because I get a discount on my bill. Right now I'm grateful I’ve got already about $100 in credit, meaning I have about a year's worth of billing.

Now, the one downside on Airtable is that every single collaborator I work with costs me more money. That means, for Michel, Joe Paris and Albert, that's another $10 plus me. I'm then looking at $48 a month for the minimum plan by collaborating with different people.

I would hope that they would get their Airtable account upgraded for free. This means if you are doing collaboration, it can be a bit more expensive. However, if you're collaborating you're also likely getting a lot more value out of it.

Would you please use my link because that will help me lower my bill and it won't cost you anything: https://airtable.com/invite/r/qGLfO5Yn

It helps Airtable to recognize that you found out about this through me. I used my friend Jordan Arsenault's link to join Airtable, so he's got a credit for me joining. If you’d like to just use a shorter affiliate link, I have jerry.tips/iairtable.

Then on my resources page on my website, I've got listed links to all the other stuff I use in my business. You don't have to hunt down the list of all the things that you need to use in your business online or the most valuable tools that are working for me, you can just see a list of all of them very quickly.

I got this video transcribed by GoTranscript and Michel at @gmichelbkk used our Airtable collaboration here to get this turned into a Steemit post that you are reading right now, because you might prefer to read instead of watching something like this.

I know that sometimes I'm just in the mood to read something instead of watching a video. If you’d prefer to have the option to read and see future posts, would you please follow me on Steemit?

Steemit is a social media network where you actually get paid for what you contribute to the website instead of making something that goes viral and getting nothing but likes for it.

If you make something that goes viral on Steemit as I've made a few things that have gone viral, you can earn thousands of dollars on one single post. That’s why Steemit is incredible. That's why I'm working with Michel to transcribe these video tutorials and get them over onto Steemit.

Thank you, I hope you have an awesome day and I hope to see you again soon.

If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?

Love,

Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk

Shared on:

PS: Witness votes are the most powerful votes we make on Steem because one vote for a witness lasts indefinitely! Would you please make a vote for jerrybanfield as a witness or set jerrybanfield as a proxy to handle all witness votes at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because when we make our votes, we feel in control of our future together?