Airtable - Mapping the Galaxy

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In my last blog post, I catalogued some of Gemini's best excuses. Now, for my third project, I'm heading into space! It's time to leave Earth and build the Galactic Guide.

The Galactic Guide An intergalactic planet tracker

The mission: single vs. multiple

In Excel, you just type whatever you want into a cell. In Airtable, you have to make a choice between Single Select and Multiple Select, in other words decide whether this thing can be one thing, or many things?

See more: 10 Easy-Peasy Airtable Experiments

I made a new column and filled it with some planets: Nebulon Prime, The Acid Swamps and New Tokyo (Mars).

Next, I added another column title Atmosphere and gave it the field type, Single Select. This would allow the captain of the Starship Enterprise to log whether a planet's atmosphere was breathable or not.

  • Nebulon Prime? Breathable (Green tag).
  • The Acid Swamps? Toxic Gas (Purple tag).
  • New Tokyo (Mars)? Vacuum (Grey tag).

This was perfect because a planet can't be both "Breathable" and a "Vacuum" at the same time. It forces you to pick one distinct category.

Taking a population census

Next, I needed to know who - or what - lived on each planet. Unlike the atmosphere, a planet can isn't limited to one kind of creature. I needed a Multiple Select field type for Humans, Giant Insects, Sentient Blobs, and Killer Robots.

  • On Nebulon Prime, Humans and Sentient Blobs hang out together.
  • In the Acid Swamps, Giant Insects are being hunted by Killer Robots.
  • In New Tokyo, Humans hunt Killer Robots for rare metals.

Using Multiple select, I could tag as many inhabitants as I wanted in a single cell, and they showed up as colourful pills.

The view from space

As with the excuses in the last project, I decided to group this data again. Interestingly, if you group by "Inhabitants", the view becomes a bit of a mess, since humans live on more than one planet.

Grouping the inhabitants into buckets based on the single select type "Atmosphere" works much better. I could see exactly which worlds were safe to visit and which ones required a space suit.

Verdict

Besides the usefulness of the different select types, I really like how easy it is to assign colours in Airtable. After all, when navigating through an asteroid field, a quick glance at a colorful spreadsheet can be life-saving!