Reporting, specifically anything involving exports, could be improved. The recent rollout of interfaces, and visual presentations of the underlying data, was a great step in the right direction to make reporting more executive-friendly. More work needs to be done to make it more user-friendly to get your data out of Airtable in simple and clean ways. It can be overwhelming for teams who may not be familiar with the backend and are faced with numerous formula fields or lookup fields to be able to summarize their data in a way that can be exported. Additionally, there is work to be done for users to be able to design exports of data groups for reporting purposes. The good news is that Airtable is actively working to improve exports. As I mentioned, I’m a big fan of Airtable Automations. That said, there is an opportunity to streamline duplicative automations by adding a trigger that covers both matches and updates. Currently, you need both a matches XYZ conditions trigger for an automation and an updated record trigger for an automation to capture when something is first created and then when it's updated. This means two separate automations to keep the same field/output updated. Airtable releasing a trigger that captured both the creation and future updates would be super handy and cut down the number of automations needed to maintain data accuracy for this example. Another feature I'd like to see is an easier way to self-link within tables. When you link records across tables, the link is automatically created within both records, but self-linking within a table requires manual linking and/or the creation of a complex automation to do it for you. It took several hours to come up with a suitable workaround to capture when a parent record changed in the child record’s linked field. In an ideal world, you would use two different tables, but then you hit the challenge of plotting those two tables on the same calendar, which has its own set of more technical workarounds.
