Google is shutting down Tables, its Airtable rival



Google Tables, a work-tracking tool and competitor to the popular spreadsheet-database hybrid Airtable, is shutting down.

In an email sent to Tables users this week, Google said the app will not be supported after December 16, 2025, and advised that users export or migrate their data to either Google Sheets or AppSheet instead, depending on their needs.

Launched in 2020, Tables focused on making project tracking more efficient with automation. It was one of the many projects to emerge from Google’s in-house app incubator, Area 120, which at the time was devoted to cranking out a number of experimental projects. Some of these projects later graduated to become a part of Google’s core offerings across Cloud, Search, Shopping and more.

Tables was one of those early successes: Google said in 2021 that the service was moving from a beta test to become an official Google Cloud product. At the time, the company said it saw Tables as a potential solution for a variety of use cases, including project management, IT operations, customer service tracking, CRM, recruiting, product development and more.

The app was created by Google employee Tim Gleason, who had spent over a decade at the company. Gleason later moved on to become a tech lead manager for Notebook LM before announcing that he would retire beginning September 2024.

Image Credits:Google

Area 120, meanwhile, was the victim of a Google re-org in 2022, when the company canceled half its projects and informed staff that a reduction in force would cut the in-house R&D division to half its size. The division that remained would focus on AI projects, Google said.

The following year, Area 120 was wound down amid broader layoffs, and a small handful of projects would move on to core Google product areas. (One of those was Aloud, which was building tools that let creators quickly dub their videos. YouTube announced an auto-dubbing feature in 2023 that became more broadly available this year.)

Tables had survived these changes, as it was a part of Google Workspace’s team under Google Cloud. Unfortunately for Tables users, the service now has its own end-of-life date, too.

In the email, Google advises Tables admins to export their data either directly to Google Sheets, then continue to manage their workflow in Sheets using tables and conditional notifications, or take advantage of a new migration tool to import their data to Google’s no-code platform, AppSheet. The latter solution preserves formatting like column types and relationships, and the workflow can then be managed with automationsfine-grained permissions, and Workspace integrations, Google says.

The company earlier this month announced the coming closure on Table’s website and directed users to a FAQ, which noted that the team behind Tables had created a new data experience to power automated apps and workflows directly inside AppSheet. This alternative, launched in June 2023, lets users build data models for custom apps and workflows directly within AppSheet, the company said.




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