Airtable’s new “timeline” view

After a full five years using their product for all manner of databasing projects, I’m thrilled to see the addition of a new View to complement the fairly recent Gantt and Mobile Kanban that have made life so much easier.

Airtable is a React-based noSQL-powered supremely user-friendly platform that provides affordable, versatile functionality to satisfy everybody from the layman to the expert developer looking for delicate RESTful capabilities out-of-the-box. As soon as you create a new tab (aka sheet: its obvious commonalities with Excel & Google Sheets mean it can be helpful to have a grasp of the terminologies associated with each of those products), a new API is built, complete with interactive documentation and example queries in cURL and JavaScript.

With such a powerful back-end it’s all-important to have an intuitive, flexible front-end that invites users in to be able to visualise their data in the most business-friendly ways. Enter Timeline, which allows you to stack items vertically by means of any (manual or calculated) Date-type field, and colour/shade them by and SingleSelect-type field. It fills the gap that’d been yawning between Gantt and Calendar views. Congrats to the Airtable devs for launching this so seamlessly and successfully last week.