Updating records from a form

The easiest & best way to do this is by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains or a list of email addresses stored in Airtable, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

Fillout lets you create 2 different types of forms:

• A “new record” form
• An “update record” form

In your case, as soon as they fill out a “new record form” for the first time, their new record will be created in Airtable, and you will send them an automated email that gives them a special URL. This special URL will enable them to update their record in Airtable by using a Fillout “update form”.

You can see how to set this up in my Airtable podcast video here:

• Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.

This video also shows off many other advanced techniques of using Fillout as well. So this video goes way beyond updating records with a form.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

I take it you’re using a ‘Find record’ step to look for the email in your main table, and then updating the fields from there? If so, I’ve put it together here for you to check out

And this is how the automation looks

You can duplicate the base into your own workspace to poke around and compare it to your own set up; lmk if you hit any issues and I’ll see what I can do to help!

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Airtable also has a guide on how to do this here with linked fields instead: https://support.airtable.com/docs/use-case-update-records-via-a-form

The principles are pretty similar but I usually don’t like putting a linked field into the form as that could lead to bad data if people unlink the value and link to another record.  Depends on your use case though; if it’s all internal and you trust the people involved then the linked field version’s easier to set up for sure!

I second Scott’s suggestion to use Fillout.

If you’re interested to try it out, here’s an overview of what you’d need to do to set it up.

1. Create a Fillout account and add a new form
2. Link your Airtable base to your new form
   1. Choose “Update record” – Update an existing record when the form is submitted
3. Add a new formula field in Airtable to store your unique Fillout link – you’ll send this unique form link to people to fill out as many times as they want. Instead of creating new records per form submission, the original record will be updated with the new information. 
   (The nice thing about this form is it’ll already be prefilled with info people have submitted before, so they won’t need to redo everything—just a quick check to confirm it’s all still correct, make quick corrections, fill in missing gaps.)
4. Create your form with newly synced Airtable fields, and publish your new form!

Example gif of using a form to update existing records, instead of creating new ones:

Example Airtable base and Fillout template to get you started:

• https://airtable.com/invite/l?inviteId=invqpml3ulxyDuxNV&inviteToken=57b549aaeb08500f90743c3ffc4c705e81210143194c4feff91c34b69e1d8923&utm_medium=email&utm_source=product_team&utm_content=transactional-alerts
• https://www.fillout.com/templates/update-airtable-record?ref=bryan20

Bryan

Hello ​@Caroline,

Do you want users to edit the data they've already entered? Or do you want them to fill out a new form and use that to update a record in Airtable?

Option 1: Edit Existing Data
For this scenario, design a form using Plumsail Forms, which supports editing records directly in Airtable. You will need to create an automation to send a unique edit link to the user via email, allowing them to edit the data at any time.

Option 2: Update Data
In this case, you will need to create an automation that matches the user's email to existing records in Airtable and updates the data accordingly.

You can use an automation platform like Make, Zapier, or n8n. The specific steps will depend on which platform you use. Which one are you currently using?