Hello! I’m Ayesha, a Product Manager here at Airtable. We’re so excited to share List View with you — a new view with you that helps you visualize the hierarchy of records across multiple tables:
What is List View?
List View is a new view type that makes it easy to create, edit, and manage hierarchical data —whether its projects and tasks, campaigns and deliverables, or a product roadmap and features —all within Airtable.
List View is built for creating and managing simple or complex projects, whether a user is looking to manage a single product roadmap or marketing campaign, build company-wide OKRs, or even manage the episode production of a TV show’s season.
Projects typically have a number of tasks, and with List View, you can easily organize those tasks based on importance, urgency, deadline, status, or another category.
This is the only view where you can see multiple fields across different tables at once.
How can I create a List View?
You can create this view in the Data tab from the bottom left, where you can create other Views like Calendar, Gallery, etc. In Interfaces, you can add a List element to your pages.
What are the key features of List View?
- You can use this view to visualize hierarchy across tables.
- Customize your rows to bring in all of the different fields across tables that you need to see:
- There are four levels of hierarchy that we support in List view today. We support three tables and the last level can include a linked record within the table to show nested records:
- You can prefix an existing checkbox field from your schema to show an intuitive way to check off your records:
Other questions?
You can check out our support article here.
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We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, please let us know if you have any questions.
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Thanks for getting back to me @Ayesha_Bose 😃
To further answer your questions;
- We're very excited about mobile support here and have this on our roadmap. We don't yet have a specific estimated timeframe, but we're working on it!
An Airtable List view on the Mobile App would be game changer for me - IF the Airtable designers can keep white space to a minimum, and cater for the simple action scrolling condesnsed lists of items (think of a shopping list).
I currently use OneNote for mobile for example (which has a sudo-list view when you start to employ check-boxes in the "Page") , which shows a check-box of approx 16 items and allows for the easy scrolling and checking off of items. It also allows to easily undo accidentally checked items quickly. Comparing Airtable App, it shows 7 records - and isn't geared for the user to quickly check records off and scroll, or undo accidentally checked-off items. I'm hoping that the Airtable List View team can address this workflow.
- For Lookup fields, can you tell me more about why you need this instead of the linked record? Since you already have the linked record field in that table, you can show any fields from either of the tables in List view. If you have a specific example here, that would be super helpful.
Yes, absolutely. The easiest example is if you have a 3 table base; Projects, Tasks and Staff. A staff member will be assigned to a Project. A Project will have many tasks linked. The tasks will use a "Lookup" to the project to show the Staff owner. I would like to sort my List View on the Task table so that the Lookup "Staff" becomes Level 2, which would show Staff as the first row, and then their tasks (from all different projects) nested under each of the staff.
With the Staff tied to a Project, there's no nice/easy way to just show each staff member and a sub-list of Tasks (not projects, but tasks) with various task fields needed in that view.
We can get close to what I describe here, but I don't believe it's possible to do what I have in mind (as this stage in development).
Below shows Staff with their Projects listed (and then, we see the tasks but not as a vertical list)
And from the Staff table, we have a similiar situation, the tasks are not vertically listed, showing other task fields.
I think that I can only show the Tasks as listed records nested under staff owners only if Lookup Fields are supported within levels. (Or, again, base schema is updated so that Staff are linked into Tasks directly, but again, often changing base schema is undesirable)
I'm sorry, looked over it: another BIG +1 for this as mentionned by @ScottWorld 👇
"Would be nice to have this hierarchical filtering functionality added to linked record fields"
This is a glorious update
My request would be to be able to have a level created from within the same table, such as using a Single Drop Down field - much like groups in Grid view
Very nice, but it desperately needs the ADD NEW RECORDS function.
It would also be really helpful if there were an option of inserting a fixed search input at the top of the list. Opening the filter options, selecting, executing is slow, when you are looking for something specific.
I was waintg for this feature to write my company standard operating procedures (SOP), but the result It doesn't have a good looking at all.
- Level 3 font is too big to my taste
- Manual sorting doesn't work
- "+Add subtask" button is annoying, it just look bad
- You can't see second levels field content with out expanding it (see picture below)
So, in general terms, it looks so uggly and messy that it is still not usefull for me . It thing this view have a great potencial to make a company SOP. But not yet.
@Ayesha_Bose- further feedback for list views, in particular the "Select a Row Height" option. This setting needs to be particular/configurable for each of the Lists "Levels", but currently it unfortunately applies awkwardly to the entire list, one height for all levels - which doesn't really make much sense.
The screenshot below shows my typical usage of 3 tables, Project - Task - SubTask layout, where the List View has been created at the Sub Task table.
Within that list view, I'm needing a Tall setting to show as much Sub-Task detail as possible, whilst at the same time I'm needing a Short setting to be applied to both the Project and the Task levels.
Having a generic "Tall" setting just leads to too much unnecessary white space everywhere.
Further to this, and importantly, a new dynamic size option need be considered - which would allow a Sub-Task long Text Field of any length to be 100% displayed within a dynamic height, regardless of character length/count. All text would be always readable with such a dynamic height setting enabled.
This looks great! It would be even better if the Allow users to edit and create records were separate. I'd like for my users to edit records but not create new ones.
is it possible to share list view ?
Hello @Ayesha_Bose ,
I already submitted a bug report via support, but I also wanted to comment here in case I can get some help with this faster. Plus this comment has bit more information, because since submitting my original list view request, I did some more playing around and realized what might be the issue.
When creating my interface I was able to create a 3-level list view page perfectly, then all of sudden I just kept getting an error page.
I then created a record summary page and added a list view element with the same exact set up as the list-view page and it just produced the same error page.
Then later on, I remembered I had set up a similar list view in the base, but with only 2 levels - key results and tasks (with a subtask lower level - subtasks are in the same table as tasks, they are linked to the same table to create subtasks). I only started having issues when I realized I actually created 3 levels (objectives, key results, & tasks w/ subtasks) in the interface. So I went back to the base list view to see if added a 3rd level would mess it up and sure enough, I was right. The same error message popped up. The problem lies in adding the 3rd level. I hope this helps in getting that bug fixed faster. Thanks.
Also there is bug in the grid view, not sure why that isn't working. It was working when I originally set it up. Same error page...
Adding my support for a shared view function for lists!
Great but it kind of misses the point if you can't embed it to an external website 😕😕
