Taking Notes in Airtable

Most ‘out-of-the-box’ CRM solutions have the ability to take notes in relation to projects, opportunities, or clients. We can build this functionality in Airtable as well, but it’s an area where I see a lot of clients potentially ‘misusing’ the software. Does this apply to you?

At first glance, the ‘Long Text’ field type seems like the perfect fit for taking some notes. Perhaps you want to record notes in relation to a client… In this case, the most obvious consideration is to build a field in your ‘Client’ table that allows for taking notes. However, you’ll quickly find that this notation system is very limited for a number of reasons – not the least of which is the fact that you can’t track the date and time of each of these notes. Instead, this system means that all notes are lumped into one clunky datapoint instead of being treated like the unique points that they are.

In this video, I further break down the pros and cons of using this approach, as well as alternative methods for tracking notes. The three possibilities you should consider are:

1. Taking notes in a Long-Text field
2. Taking notes in the ‘Activity’ section of each record
3. Creating a new table to track notes in relation to your first table

My personal preference is #3 because it allows you to get maximum value from your notes. That said, it’s not an intuitive solution, so definitely check out these tips for getting the most out of your data!