Oops! Editable shared view update

Thanks for the honesty…

It’s obvious that this is a much needed feature, so I look forward to seeing a version of this in the near future.

Yes, I’m to blame here for being enthusiastic and proactive towards my clients for a feature they are longing for :upside_down_face:

I’m sure that we will all be more cautious about informing customers about new features from now on.

However, it is quite possible that he had far more than 30 minutes experience with this feature. It has been in enterprise beta for a while, and it isn’t that complex a feature to figure out. The feature was also active for more than 30 minutes this morning, and multiple consultants had verification from others that this feature was widely available. Given Airtable’s history of how it rolls out feature changes, thinking that this was a new public feature was a reasonable assumption.

For the benefit of those who work at Airtable who may not be familiar, there are at least two major regular live webcasts whose sole purpose is to discuss Airtable-related news: BuiltOnAir (Tuesdays) and Off The Record (Wednesdays).

Naturally, since we saw this change in several non-Enterprise accounts this morning, we discussed our first impressions on today’s episode, which was broadcasted live prior to the retraction. Part of what we do every episode is to test/clarify new features as they arrive so that consultants and lay-people stay up to date.

Of course accidents happen, but if there were a day to push updates that may accidently release a game changer such as this, I would recommend it be Thursday just based on that alone.

I had like a minimum of 2 hours on this. Even the always great GAP Consulting did a 14’ tutorial on the topic! This, in combo with the BuiltOnAir session, the many confirmative messages on LinkedIn, Twitter and the BuiltOnAir community, and we are labelled idiots for wanting to share this asap with our customers… :man_facepalming:

Thank you for calling this out, super great point!!

Wow! I guess I missed quite a lot. Starting to see the frustration more… that said, I also assume that whoever made this mistake did not do it on purpose! We’re all out here pushing Airtable to implement tons of new features that we want, and they’re making a lot of them happen. I’m really appreciative of that

@Jordan_Scott1 This is a gigantic disappointment.

We have seen many of these “silly little missteps” in the past couple weeks. Emails that arent supposed to go off. $0 invoice emails for plans that were not $0 or not billed monthly. Telling us scripting was still free. Then telling us scripting would only be free for a month. Then saying oh sorry didn’t mean that it’s free again. These things are getting worse. Not better. They scaled too fast internally and are paying the price for it. Either that or didn’t scale in the right areas and have unsupported departments. Either way. A lot of us long time users are cringing like this sometimes on a daily basis. I promise you the reactions are not unfounded and this is not a new conversation. Not to mention this has been a DESPERATELY needed feature request for a very long time. So for us it was the big “FINALLY” and we all have egg on our face now. Now if Airtable had a flawless history of notifying us when new features were released at the time that they were released or even before for select groups of consultants then we might have thought it was odd that we hadn’t heard from airtable and just submitted big reports or asked private internal contacts, but that isn’t how it has been. Hence the outrage.

You actually got a plug on built on air this morning. Love your content. Long time fan. It also seems to me as a predominant airtable content creator you would also benefit from knowing about new features a little bit ahead of time which is ultimately what we are asking for. Communication. I hope you know I mean no malice or sarcasm by any of this. Just trying to explain our position.

Seriously disappointed. With all the funding, Airtable could have done better!

My Twitter post :clown_face:

Follow me for more fake news :man_shrugging:

Best
Sergio

The most requested feature and I didnt know they had it built all along. I thought I was dreaming when I saw it.

oh wells… I think “right solution” ment they’re thinking how to charge us for this feature. I think if they did enable it, users would not buy plan seats and use the public edit feature instead and CFO says no go. :smiling_face_with_tear: Its more of a “would this affect my revenue decision” rather than the “right solution for users”

Thank you! I’m feeling a bit misinterpreted here. My comment above was in response to an extra spicy comment, which the poster later acknowledged was over-spicy. I felt (and still feel) defensive of Jordan, who is not the person who made this mistake, AND the poor person who actually did make this big mistake, who probably feels terrible about it! I have experience being in a super fast-growing business, and have made plenty of my own mistakes. It doesn’t mean they’re ok, but they happen. I’m also learning a lot from the posts on here, including yours, about how they’ve been affected by these issues :slightly_smiling_face:

I am very sure that it is far more complex than deciding on a price. User permissions go far beyond this feature. User permissions touch on many, many aspects of Airtable, even aspects that most users are unaware of. Getting changes to user permissions is critical to being able to share interfaces, for example.

As far as pricing goes, this feature has been in beta for select enterprise customers for a while. It is likely that when it comes out of beta, it will be limited to enterprise customers. If you already are an enterprise customer, you can likely request access to the beta for no charge.

If you are not an enterprise customer, Airtable has no obligation to provide new features at any particular price point. Of course Airtable users would like to get new features for free. But Airtable is a business and they also need to make money.

I think this is a case where Airtable should embrace the Stockdale paradox (Jim Collins - Concepts - The Stockdale Paradox): confront the brutal reality of this mistake and it consequences for your paying/product selling customers. So no, there’s nothing wrong with “a bit spicy”.

That being said, it’s a new day and we’ll just add this to the list (being an Airtable user for 6 years or so now) and move on.

I can understand why Airtable can’t make this feature official.
This is directly linked to their pricing model, in a very very negative way.

Solution?
I really wish Airtable provides “per base” or “per data” pricing model on top of “per user” pricing model. That, i think is the only solution to make this feature official.

Current pricing model is unreachable for customers with a limited number of bases but many users.

Que desencanto tan grande!!!
Habilite más de 5 vistas para poder trabajar en equipo que hace tiempo lo necesitaba… y ahora esto?
No entiendo que ha pasado, pero mucho menos entiendo la decisión de “Sin embargo, actualmente no estamos priorizando el desarrollo de esta función…” sabiendo que es muy esperada y tanta alegría generó.
Ojala revean la situación.

yes we know exactly how we would make you happy and we have it already programmed. But we won’t give it to you, we will give you something else. we don’t know when we give it to us either. I hope you’re looking forward to it. this is really so…… so many people are waiting for it. or at least lock the creation of new views. nothing.

Please make this functionality work!! It’s Airtable’s biggest blocker for my team as we work constantly with external clients.

How unfortunate that this is not a priority. I have a large working table and have shared the great flexibility of airtable to several other companies that have taken to now using AT. I however have found that I have now become limited in my use due to not being able to share a specific limited view with my warehouse staff that they can use - update and keep the workflow happening. I don’t want to them to see all the customer private information or the costs involved or the other sensitive information I have in the full base. I just want them to see the limited information pertaining to them. I have spent days and days trying to create a synced base for them to be able to edit and then try to have all the updated information sync back to the main base. It has been a nightmare and I am still trying to get it to work because the automation linking of two tables although says it’s worked doesn’t. PLEASE, PLEASE, let us have the editable limited shared view. Life and working with AT would be so much more pleasurable.

I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for Airtable to implement this feature. It could be years or never, and if it does come out, it might be restricted to customers paying $10k per year for the enterprise plan.

You might be able to implement some workarounds to achieve a similar effect, such as using links to prefilled forms, and then using automations to update existing records. But that’s a pain.

In the meantime, the only way to get the full functionality that you’re looking for is to pay for a 3rd-party portal tool. The current Airtable portals are MiniExtensions.com, GlideApps.com, Softr.io, Pory.io, and StackerHQ.com. I don’t know if there are any others that are currently available.

p.s. As an expert Airtable consultant, I have experience with all of these portals and am available to help people set these up:

It is THE MOST blocking factor in Airtable imo.

Another simple example: I’ve built a digital directory for a national organisation with local chapters. Without giving them access to the entire base, I can’t even simply share a view of a local chapter to its president, to change their member data.

With the plan Airtable has, I’m probably going to have to ask each and everyone of them to create an Airtable account just for this, not to mention having to create an interface and no doubt paying more money than I’m already doing.

There are no doubt, like always, enough cons to this feature, but as a customer, it doesn’t outweigh the pros for me.

It would be nice if they would allow people to become enterprise users without a minimum number of users. I don’t get why they wouldn’t allow this. They would gain more enterprise customers who have the potential to grow, being that they would now have access to more features. :woman_shrugging:t4:

While we’re waiting for an official solution, the workaround using prefilled forms and automation is really not bad.

This video from No-Code Ireland shows to to do it (and it’s pleasantly cheeky):

I made a video that describes shows how to do it as well (you’d need to add a button like in the above video to get full functionality)