To begin, make sure you’re already logged into your Airtable account in your browser.

Parabola offers a free plan with 1 publish ‘flow’ and manual runs. If you haven’t already, you can check out their plans and sign up for a free account.

Once logged in, click on the default ‘Untitled’ flow and give it a name. Alternatively, you can begin with a new flow from scratch.

From the right hand list, drag and drop the Airtable Import source onto the canvas.

Hover of the Airtable 'step' (building block) and click on the Settings/ Result  icon at the bottom and Authorize your Airtable with Parabola.
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Parabola provide helpful tips and links to relevant documentation throughout their app. You’ll need your Airtable API key for this authorization and Parabola mentions just the required link from where you can fetch it.

Make a note of the Airtable Base and the name of the table within it from where you want to fetch data. Then, head to Airtable’s API page: https://airtable.com/api and select your required base. Copy the base ID into Parabola, and then enter the required table name.

Click on Show Updated Results to fetch the data into Parabola.

By default, this will fetch all the rows and columns from the Airtable table into Parabola. For our demo, we don’t need the id and createdTime columns. So, we’ve removed these using the Advanced Settings option.

If you’re happy with the results, close the window using the ⅹ on the top right.

Let’s do some calculations to arrive at the data we want. We want to display a leaderboard of the sales amount broken down by sales agent on our Geckoboard dashboard.
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We’ll use Parabola’s Group By feature to achieve this. First, search for group by in the right hand list and drag and drop it onto the canvas.

Click drag the arrow from Airtable Import step to the Group By step to pass data into the latter.

Click on the Settings/ Result icon under Group By.

Now we'll Sum the values under the Plan Value column and then Group by the Sales Agent column. Once done, click on Show Updated Results. We can already see the leaderboard beginning to take shape.
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Close the window now using the x on the top right and proceed to the next step.

Let’s now add the destination, Geckoboard, to push our data to. Search the right hand list for Geckoboard and drag and drop it on to the canvas.

Pull the arrow from the Group By step to the Geckoboard step. Click on the Settings/ Result  icon under the Geckoboard step.

Click on Authorize. Fetch your Geckoboard API key from here: https://app.geckoboard.com/account/details and fill it up in the Parabola input field.

Give your dataset a name. This will be the name you see for your dataset within Geckoboard as well.

Note: Datasets names should start and end with lowercase alphanumeric characters and may only contain lowercase alphanumeric characters, dots, hyphens, and underscores.

​Example: Example of a good dataset name: sales.by_agent

Map your columns to the correct Datasets field type. The available field types are: Date, Datetime, Money, Number, Percentage, String (Text). The names are self-explanatory but we suggest having a quick read about the field types in our API reference.
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For our example, we'll map Sales Agent to Text and Plan Value (sum) to Money. In the subsequent dropdown that pops up, we'll choose the Currency as US Dollar.
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Click Show Updated Results. The resulting values are what will be used to visualize as leaderboard, bar charts, line charts, number, table, gauge, etc on Geckoboard and build your dashboards.
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Once you’re happy with these resulting values, close the window now using the ⅹ.

Publish the flow. And push your data to Geckoboard using the Run Now button. You should see if it succeeded or not, along with some info on the pushed data or the error messages, under the ‘Run History’ section to the right.
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If needed, you can use those error messages to troubleshoot what went wrong.

Assuming all went well, hop on to your Geckoboard account now.
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Click Add widget, then Search for and choose Datasets, and select the sales.by_agent dataset that we just created.
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Tip: Don't worry in case you see a message saying Your dataset does not contain any date or datetime fields, which are required for a line chart. or 'Your dataset does not contain the data required for this visualization'.
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It only means the data we’ve pushed cannot build that particular visualization (usually line charts). But we should have the necessary data for building other visualizations such as Leaderboard and Number (which are the ones we want).

Preview the dataset first using the dropdown next to the dataset name sales.by_agent in the header. It should match what we saw and pushed from Parabola.

You’ve successfully pushed data to Geckoboard at this stage.

Let’s first build the Leaderboard. Select the Leaderboard visualization type from the top left. It should populate with the data from the dataset and show you a preview.

We feel the US$ prefix is unnecessary, as is displaying the entire numeric value for e.g. 1,237. Lets fine-tune this to something more readable.

Give the widget a title. And add the widget to your dashboard by clicking Add to dashboard. Resize the widget as per your liking. You should have a Leaderboard of your sales by agent on your dashboard now. 😊

Let’s move on to building the Number widget displaying our total sales.

Tip: Datasets itself offers a few aggregation features such as sum, average, min, max, latest, and more. While building your own Geckoboard datasets / Parabola flows, you can plan accordingly and make efficient and combined use of the calculations, number crunching, and aggregation options available in both Geckoboard and Parabola.

Keeping in mind the above tip, we’ll use the aggregations available in Datasets to our advantage and instead of performing any additional calculations or creating a separate flow within Parabola, we’ll simply aggregate (i.e. sum) the sales values of all the sales agent within Datasets itself and that’ll give us our total team sales.

Add a new Datasets widget and select the required dataset. Select the Number visualization. And set the Field to Plan Value and the Aggregate to Sum.

Fine-tune again as needed and give the widget a title. We’ll also set a Goal and finally add the widget to the dashboard.

Resize the widget as needed. And with that, we have the widgets we want on the board.

Click on Schedule in the right handle section next to Run History, and then Add Rule.

Configure the scheduler based on how often (e.g. every hour) you want the data to be fetched from Airtable and pushed to Geckoboard, the first run, last run, etc.

Once you’re happy with the settings, Save the rule.

Scheduling in Parabola requires a paid plan. You can check out their pricing options: https://parabola.io/pricing (make sure to scroll down on the page to understand how scheduling factors into the pricing).