Success in 10 minutes
Welcome to Retable! This guide will help you get the most out of your Retable experience. You are encouraged to go down the list step by step, reading the articles and watching the videos in order to explore and understand the capabilities of Retable.
And while there’s plenty to discover about working in Retable, you can get familiar with the basics in just 10 minutes and start seeing the results right away!
As an example, we used a specific template - however these steps would work for almost any use case. People use Retable for everything from marketing workflows to auto inventory part tracking to keeping track of their customers.
Understand your data structure
Before we dive into adding or importing data, it is important to know the most important sections of a Retable screen. This screen includes a project called 'HR Knowledge Base Spreadsheet template' together with one project (but can be many) and two views.
Note that if you are moving from Airtable to Retable, there is a handy migration utility. Follow the steps here to migrate all your bases to Retable.
Table: Every project consists of tables which are sets of data you use in your work.
Columns: Each column has a specific type (e.g text, date etc) included in the rows.
Rows: Each row is a set of data in that table
Data actions: This is where you add additional formatting to your current data (e.g filtering, sorting and font colors)
View types: In addition to the generic 'grid type' that you are familiar with Excel or Google Sheets, Retable has several view types, e.g forms, card, Kanban, chart or map.
In the next step, we are going to create your first workspace.
Step 1: Create your first workspace and project
Upon logging in, you will see a sample workspace with several templates you can use as a base. A workspace is a collection of projects where each project can hold several tables and views.
When you first start with Retable, feel free to use any of our templates, or directly go to the Templates section in your app to search for a template you would need. All 90+ templates in Retable are readily available for one of your use-cases. Using a template can greatly decrease the time to get set up.
See how to create a workspace and project here. Upon completing, read on to step 2.
Step 2: Decide how you will use Retable
Now it is time to understand how Retable can help you. Bear in mind that Retable is designed with one focus in mind: Keep your company data and workflow in one place. That being said, try to write down:
What workflows you have
Your team's goals
Data you keep scattered around but want to add everything in one place
Think about which company members and client users you'll invite to Retable
Retable has several different column types, and they each serve a different purpose. They allow you to organize all company information so it can easily be sorted, managed, and analyzed. Those columns are vertically present in your tables, and each one keeps different data.
The most used column types are:
Text field: This is the most generic field type - basically you can write anything here, e.g. project name, task name, customer name, and such.
Single or multi-select field: This helps track key details with your data. It allows you to create a custom set of dropdown options.
Date field: You can enter a date and/or time that is associated with your project (e.g a timeline or deadline).
Collaborator field: It is used to assign a task to someone, whether he/she is in your team or not. This field helps you tag one or more collaborators who can read, edit or collaborate with your table. They are basically people associated with a task/user mentioned in that row. The only requirement here is that, you previously must have shared the workspace or the project with the people you are going to use in this column.
There are more than 30 different column (field) types in Retable, and the ones above are just the tip of the iceberg. Read this further if you would like to understand what each column type is capable of.
Step 3: Import data from other tools
Retable has the ability to import data from several tools. There are a few ways to do this - one of them is exporting using CSV and then importing into Retable. You can do this by clicking on "New project" in your dashboard, and select the "Import document" option.
Note that you can also migrate from Airtable, as depicted in this document.
Step 4: Decide how you will structure your data
Once you’ve got your workflow up and running, you can use different types of views Retable provides to enhance the way your data looks. This list shows what view types Retable has, and when to use them.
View type | When to use |
Grid view | Details of a project, product, task, costumers, plans, deals and more |
Chart view | Build a colorful chart and get a big-picture of a table |
Calendar view | Upcoming due dates |
Kanban view | Task and project status |
Form view | Get responses to your surveys and data |
Map view | Display all the locations on a map |
Depending on what type of data to manage, choose the view that best suits your purpose and best displays your data. You can also repetitively use Grid view to store information and show in a way that different employees in your team can enjoy.
Step 5: Link your data
One of the most used features of Retable is to be able to link data between tables in the same project. Assume that you have a customer table and a project table. In the project table, you map each project to a customer.
Rather than defining each customer again in the project table, you just link a column to the customer table and return the values automatically - this way, when a customer is added to the customer table, you can automatically retrieve this information to reflect changes in the project table - and don't have to type in a new customer information repetitively.
Another example - a consultancy company would like to connect a person in the Projects table to the Client table to help connect the contact information about each project owner. There is no need to create another field - a linked record allows this connection automatically.
Step 6: Onboard your team
Now that you have started to include some company-related data in your workflow, it is time to include more team members in your organization. This can happen in two ways:
Option 1: Creating an organization and adding users to your organization: In this option, you create an organization and add users (either internal to the company or a client user). Each user will go towards your user limit in your plan. Most of the time you would want to go this way.
Option 2: Adding a user to the workspace or project: If the user you are going to add has his/her own plan, then this is a better option. In this case, your organization user count won't be affected.
When you invite a user, you'll most probably go with Option 1.
Step 7: Automate your work
Automations let you eliminate repetitive tasks from your work, offering a reliable and consistent way to streamline your processes.
Find more information about Automations here.
Step 8: Integrate with other platforms
Retable can integrate with several platforms of your choice, including but not limited to Zapier, Make, Integrately and Pabbly. This way, you can build a two way sync of Retable and another application of your choice.
Find more information about Integrations here.
Step 9: Need more help?
This guide is by no means complete. Should you have any questions, feel free to contact us using one of the links below:
Find us in our Discord channel - hang out with Retable users, ask questions and help others.
Hop on to Facebook Retable group and ask your questions.
If you are a Redditor, click here and exchange your questions, answers and future ideas to a better Retable.
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