In a traditional spreadsheet, every user sees the contents of your sheets in the same way—if you want to hide or freeze columns, for example, everyone else will be forced to see those changes as well.
In Airtable, however, you can create views, which are set, specified ways of looking at your information. What does this mean? Well, here are some examples of views you could create:
- If you have a table of tasks, you could create separate views for each workspace collaborator, each of which would only show the tasks assigned to a particular workspace collaborator.
- If you have a table with many, many fields, you can create a view which will hide certain fields and make the table a little easier to navigate.
- If you have a table of meetings with clients, you could create a calendar view which will plot all of your client meetings on a monthly calendar.
The important thing to understand is that a view is just a different way of looking at the same underlying data!(This means that if you edit the data in a record while in one view, it will change that data for all views, since all views are looking at the same record.)
In fact, whenever you're looking at your data in Airtable, you're always looking at your data through a view! Even if you're looking at your data through the default "Main View" that comes with every new table, you're still looking at your data through a view.