Airtable is a sophisticated and comprehensive cloud-based platform. For many, the built-in reports and analysis that Airtable offers is enough for our day-to-day needs. However, if you need something a little more customized, you need to aggregate your data over multiple Airtable accounts, or you need to cross-reference your Airtable data with other cloud services, then you’re going to have to build it yourself. And what better way than using the tool you’re already familiar with - Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio).
In this article, I’ll take you through the steps to connect Looker to your Airtable data, and get started customizing the reports you need.
First - grab your SyncHub Credentials
If you don’t already have a SyncHub account, you can grab a free trial here - go on, I’ll wait - it only takes a minute and you can cancel as soon as you’ve finished this tutorial if you like.
Ready? Now, a quick reminder - SyncHub works by staging your Airtable data in a relational database. This gives us a huge advantage over other connectors which query the Airtable API directly, but I won’t go in to them here. The point is, once you have connected your Airtable account, querying from Looker is trivial as you are just using its native SQL Server Connector.
So, once you’re connected, go to your SyncHub Dashboard and grab your new database credentials, then proceed back to this article
Reading your Airtable data from Looker Studio
We now just need to tell Looker where to find your data, and for this we use the built-in SQL Server connector - easy! Hit the Add Data button, then search for “SQL Server”:
Now, plug in the credentials which you downloaded from SyncHub earlier:
Once authenticated, you can write a custom query to extract just the view you need. For example, this SQL grabs the top few records from your Database table:
select [ID], [Name], [PermissionLevel]
from schema_airtable_1.Database
Keeping your data up-to-date
SyncHub updates it’s staged data from Airtable in near-realtime, so it’s always available. However, Looker offers it’s own cache which may have a different refresh setting. To adjust the freshness of your data, remember to Edit your connection and then the Data Freshness value:
Beyond Airtable
Airtable-specific reports are essential, but the true power of SyncHub comes when you augment your Airtable data with additional information:
- SyncHub allows you to pull in data from multiple Airtable accounts, and compare/report/aggregate from within the same Looker report. See this blog article for details on aggregating your Airtable data.
- Most businesses use multiple cloud platforms. SyncHub provides connectors to a wide range of popular cloud platforms. Imagine the insights you could gather by consolidating this information into a single dashboard (or see this case study for real-world examples).
So what are you waiting for? Grab a free trial of SyncHub here and see what you can do. In ten minutes from now, you could be reporting against your Airtable data and taking your first steps towards a data-driven business.