An Organized Author’s Airtable base template is a step in the right direction for any author who wants to hone their organizational skills and truly master the business of their books. If you’re new to our templates or just need a few extra tips this one is for you. Today we’re going to talk about some of the organizational tools in Airtable and how to use them to your advantage. This information can be applied to any of our base templates and completely depends on your personal preferences.
Hiding Fields
Sometimes we may have unused fields in our bases, or we just want to see a specific amount of information when we go into our base. In order to simplify our bases, we can select which fields we want to show or hide in any of the views. Go to the Fields box at the top right side of your template and select it. You’ll see the full list of fields in the base. From there you can choose to show or hide fields based on the information you need.
Whenever you choose to hide fields it won’t be transferred over to other views in the base, meaning, in some views, you can choose to have all fields visible and in another have only some of the fields visible. This means we can set up different grid views for different purposes. Say you’re working in our Social Media Content Manager and Schedule, we can have one grid view set up to just show us the fields that involve post information like our graphics, copy and post date. In another view hide those fields and only show our insight information like clicks, shares, etc. This can make the information we’re looking for a little bit easier to find, saving you valuable time that could be used to write!
Grouping
In addition to hiding fields, we can also create groupings of records so records with similar information all appear in the same place in our bases. Dividing our records into groupings can be extremely helpful when it comes to finding information. We can easily open and close groupings to simplify our base and only show specific records.
To do this, go to the groupings box in the menu at the top of the base to change them in your base.
We can choose to group by whatever field we want, however, we can only group by three fields at a time. We can change the order alphabetically and then hide records based on whether they contain the information we’re looking for. We think grouping is incredibly helpful and use it for most of our base templates.
We generally like to group by month especially if our records are tasks we need to complete or social media posts and advertisements that need to run in a certain timeframe.
We also like to group by other fields like in our Master Plan where we group by task type and by the overall status of the task. This helps us keep on track so we can make sure our most important tasks are being completed on time. Like hiding fields, we can choose to use different groupings in different views in the same base. For example, we can group by task type and by date completed in one view, and by the month we need to complete our task and by the person assigned to that task in another view. Overall, grouping can be a very powerful way to keep track of your information and keep you accountable.
Filtering
After grouping, we can further organize the views in our base with filtering. Go to the Filters box at the top of the base. From there we can choose to filter records by any field we’d like, we can set several different parameters and choose exactly what detail we want—like a specific word or status. 
We can also choose to use multiple filters at once if we’d like our information to be more specific.
We primarily use our filters to create views that only show information for a given year, so we would use the date field in the filter box and choose to show only records that are dated with 2021 and so on. Different views in the same base can have different filter parameters so we can create views for specific years, specific tasks, and more.
Sorting
We can also choose to sort our entries by field, this is particularly helpful when creating task lists or schedules. Go to the sort box in the menu above the base. From there we can choose what field to sort by, we can use any field to sort and choose to sort by multiple fields. Depending on the field we choose, we can either sort in alphabetical order or largest to smallest and vice versa. As was said earlier, we use the sort function to build task lists and schedules.
We sort our records by date so we know what tasks needed to be completed and when. Like the other tools, these sorting parameters can vary view to view in the same base.
Coloring
Finally, we can tag our record with a color. Go to the color box in the menu at the top of the base, from there we can choose to color our records by a select field. Based on what is entered in those fields, our records will be colored accordingly.
This is just an easy way to keep track of important information about our records without having to look at a specific field.
As always if you have any questions feel free to reach out to us via our website and keep on the lookout for future newsletters and blog posts as well as follow us on social media!
Have a good one and get writing!
Frank, Organized Authors
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