How to make your Airtable base work for you with Automations

Sometimes, your work will require creative problem-solving: you’ll face challenges that differ substantially from the ones you’ve faced previously, and you’ll need to analyze new information in order to make mission-critical decisions that will alter your pre-existing processes. But other times, your work will require certain kinds of predictable or repetitive tasks, like data entry or project management. Time spent on these kinds of tasks is precious time taken away from making progress on your high-impact work.

Fortunately, when your work does follow predictable patterns, you can streamline your tasks and processes with Airtable Automations: a powerful and flexible rules engine that allows you to build custom trigger-and-action sequences on top of your Airtable base—no coding required. You can send notifications and alerts with context, automate redundant tasks, and orchestrate your work by integrating Airtable with Slack, Google Calendar, and more.

Every automation consists of a trigger and an action. You can think of an automation as a kind of “if” statement: if the trigger condition is met, then the action automatically happens. You can also create complex triggers that involve more than one condition, and you can chain actions together so that multiple steps happen in succession or simultaneously.

Automations are totally customizable and can be used to solve all kinds of problems. We’ve created the following step-by-step guides to show how you can get started with your own automations.

Alerts and notifications

Ensure that all your colleagues, customers, and stakeholders stay informed in real time by setting up notifications with Airtable Automations. You can send notifications via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams in response to custom triggers tailored to your team’s specific workflow.

How to create custom notifications for your base

This guide will give you step-by-step instructions showing you how to set up an automation that sends both an email notification and a Slack notification after a request form is submitted.

Scheduling

Having a single source of truth for your schedule is critical—and with Airtable Automations, you can integrate your calendar applications directly with your most important Airtable bases so that your schedule is always up-to-date with the latest information.

How to automatically schedule Google Calendar events from Airtable

This guide will give you step-by-step instructions for how you can set up an automation to automatically schedule Google Calendar events based on the contents of your Airtable records.

Publishing

Airtable might be where you plan all of your social media content, but did you know that you can also use Airtable Automations to publish your content, too? In addition to workshopping and scheduling your tweets and Facebook posts in Airtable, you can also set up integrations to automatically post content for you. You and your team can provide the creative work, and Airtable will ensure it gets where it needs to go!

How to automatically post to Twitter without leaving your base

This guide will show you how you can automate your social media calendar to automatically tweet for you.

Approvals

The cycle of reviews and approvals can become quite the slog if you have to spend your days navigating a seemingly endless back-and-forth of emails. Save time—so you can instead focus your efforts on improving actual work outcomes—by letting automations handle your communications for you.

How to automatically send approval emails without leaving your base

This guide will show you how to set up an automation that automatically sends emails to designated content approvers every time that a project’s status field is updated to indicate that it’s ready for approvals.

Request management

Spending time manually triaging inbound requests from clients and other teams can add extraneous overhead to your processes. Ensure your most critical work begins without any unnecessary delays by automating away routine tasks.

How to keep clients in the loop with automatic email notifications

This guide will show you how to set up an automation that will send out email requests for reviews to clients. Whenever you mark a project as ready for customer review, the base will automatically send an email to the associated client, notifying them that the project is ready for their feedback.

Have more Automations guides you’d like to see from us? Give us your suggestions on our community forums. You can also sign up here to get notified by email whenever we post a new guide.

Want Airtable to integrate with a specific service? Check out our integrations page, where you can see a more extensive list of our available integrations and fill out a form to request new services.