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Welcome to the SeaTable Online Course 3 – Collaboration!

In Course 1 you learned the basics, and in Course 2 you built a complete business process. So far, though, you have been working on your own. In real life, data is rarely a solo affair: your colleagues need to read it, comment on it, edit it, and build on top of it, all without stepping on each other. That is what this course is about — collaboration.

This course is ideal for you if you:

Picture the setting: your company manages its customers as a team. You own the customer list, and your colleagues need to work with it in one way or another. Throughout the course you will play both sides of that relationship — sometimes the owner of the data, sometimes a colleague who reads, comments on, and reuses it.

Step by step, you will learn how to:

  • share a base with a colleague and choose the right permission level.
  • comment and @mention to discuss specific records, and understand when a notification actually fires.
  • read the activity history to see who changed what, and restore a value to an earlier state.
  • distribute a live, always-up-to-date dataset to another team with the common dataset feature, so their copy stays in sync with yours.
  • collaborate visually in real time on the whiteboard.

By the end, you will have a practical toolkit for working on shared data with confidence.

Whether you follow along with a real colleague or on your own, you will need:

  1. SeaTable account: Use an account on any SeaTable system; your account from course 1 or 2 will do fine.
  2. Forum: An account in our community forum if you would like to receive a badge after completing the course.
  3. Two groups: Two groups in your team — a Commercial group, where your Sales CRM base will live, and a Marketing group for your colleague. We explain how to create them below. This is more than tidiness: a base must sit in a group for the common dataset in Step 5 to work.
  4. Browser and language: We recommend Google Chrome, and the course and quiz are in English.

If you are taking the solo path — playing both roles yourself, with no teammate following along — you will also need:

  1. A second account: A second SeaTable account, added to your team, to play the role of a colleague. A second email address is all it takes. We explain how to set this up just below.
  2. Two browser windows: One ordinary window 🌐 signed in to your main account, and one private window 🕶 signed in to the second account, so you can switch between the two roles. A wide screen is recommended, as the two windows sit side by side; a laptop screen is cramped and a phone will not work.

Throughout the course you play two roles, one in each window:

  • 🌐 You (Commercial): your main window, signed in to your own account on the Commercial team. You own the company’s customer list, and this is the role you play for most of the course. In SeaTable’s own logs this account appears under your own name (in this course’s screenshots it is labelled “Commercial”).
  • 🕶 Malika (Marketing): your second account, opened in a private window. Malika is Head of Marketing and needs to read, comment on, and reuse your data.

Every instruction in the course is tagged with the window it belongs to — 🌐 your window (Commercial) or 🕶 Malika’s window (Marketing) — so you always know where to act.

To play the colleague you need a second account that is a member of your team. In SeaTable, bringing someone into a team is called adding a team member: a team administrator invites the person by email, and once they accept they can be shared bases, @mentioned, and added to groups.

From your team administration , invite a second email address, then accept the invitation from that address. A second, free email address from any provider is enough to stand in for your colleague. When you set up this second account, give it the name Malika so that the names you later see in comments, @mentions, the activity log and the last-modifier column match the ones shown throughout this course. The full procedure is covered in the help article linked at the bottom of this page.

SeaTable lets you organise bases into groups — shared containers that may stand for a particular project, or in our case for a department. This course uses two:

  • a Commercial group, your own department, where your Sales CRM base will live from Step 1 onwards.
  • a Marketing group, your colleague’s department, which Malika belongs to and which you will distribute the live dataset to in Step 5.

From your team administration , create both groups, then add the Malika account as a member of the Marketing group. The help articles at the bottom of this page walk through it.

Once the second account is a member of your team, set up your workspace so both accounts can stay signed in at the same time:

  1. Keep your 🌐 main window signed in to your own account (Commercial).
  2. Open a 🕶 private window (in Chrome, press Ctrl + Shift + N ) and sign in there as the Malika (Marketing) account. A private window lets both accounts stay logged in at once without conflicting.

The course lasts about an hour, but you can go through it at your own pace. Breaks are possible at any time, and you decide how deep you want to go with the “try it yourself” prompts along the way.

At the end of this course you can test your knowledge in a quiz:

  • The quiz is in English and consists of multiple-choice questions about the collaboration features you have used.
  • Upon successful completion, you receive a badge for your forum profile , which makes your skills visible.

What are we waiting for? Let’s go!

Help article with further information