Add data with records
Airtable
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Add data with records
With your base’s structure set up, you’re ready to start filling in all the items you need to track for your workflow.
Records are the core unit of your Airtable base. Each one might look like a simple item in a list, but they’re actually the most important building blocks for a dynamic workflow.
What is a record?
A record is an individual item in a table, along with all of its relevant details. You can think of it as the individual unit of the table—if your table is organizing events at a conference, each record would be a presentation, or if you're producing a television series, each record would be an individual episode.
The records you store in your tables will depend on your needs and use case. If you’re using Airtable to manage projects, each record might be a task. If you’re managing a budget tracker, each record may be a client or a billable item. If you’re tracking content production, each record would be a piece of content—an episode, a blog post, or a podcast. It’s up to you and your team’s workflow!
Same record, different perspective
In the default grid view of a table, each record is shown as a single row. But with Airtable, you’re not limited to just grids—you can use views to see those records in different visual ways.
For instance, a gallery view is handy if you have images associated with each record, or a calendar is useful if you need to tie each one to a date.
Pro tip
Because you can visualize records in different ways, it’s important to have a name for each that you can easily recognize.
Make sure to put the name of your records in the first column you see in your table—what’s known as the primary field. If we continue the example of producing a television series, then the primary field would hold each episode’s name and number.
Take action: Add records to your table
Go ahead and start adding records to your table. You can manually add a record by selecting the plus sign at the bottom of a grid view, or with the shortcut shift + return.
