Airtable - The Ultimate Sandwich Architect

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After cataloguing excuses and mapping the stars, I started to get a bit peckish. For my fourth project, I headed to the kitchen to make a sandwich.

This lesson made me ponder an important question - is a cheddar cheese sandwich sweet, veggie or meat?

The Ultimate Sandwich Architect A cheese sandwich is vegetarian, right? Right?!

Drafting the menu

I started by renaming the main column to Sandwich Name and entering a few contenders: The Meat Mountain, The Humble PB&J, The Salad Wrap and, of course, The Cheddar Cheese.

To make things interesting, I added a Rating field called "Messiness".

  • The Meat Mountain? 5 Stars. (Grease everywhere).
  • The Humble PB&J? 2 Stars. (Sticky fingers).
  • The Salad Wrap? 1 Star. (Clean eats).
  • The Cheddar Cheese? 3 stars (Grated droppings).

Deciding on groups

Next, I needed to categorise them. I created a Single Select field called "Main Type" with options for Meat, Veggie, and Sweet.

Assigning the types was a bit of a head scratcher. Clearly, the Meat Mountain was meat, the PB&J was sweet, the Salad Wrap was veggie, but how about the Cheddar Cheese? You could make a case for it being any or all of the above! I settled on veggie for now, since vegetarians will usually gobble it up.

The sandwich surprise!

Once I had assigned the types, I grouped the grid by "Main Type", and just like with the planets last lesson, Airtable snapped the sandwiches into colorful buckets.

But how about that important question? What would happen if I moved the Cheddar Cheese out of the Veggie bucket and into a different one? I grabbed the sandwich and physically dragged it into the Sweet group.

See more: 10 Easy-Peasy Airtable Experiments

In Excel, this would just move the row. In Airtable however, it actually updated the data. As soon as I dropped the Cheddar Cheese into the new group, its "Main Type" automatically changed from Veggie to Sweet. Magical!

Cheddar tastes sweet Notice the cheese sandwich is now sweet?

Verdict

It's a small feature, but has huge implications. It means you can edit your data just by moving it around. That could be extremely convenient or... quite destructive! I'll think about that while I chew on this sandwich.