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I am a big Airtable fan, I am very careful, but every now and then I create empty records by clicking on sections, etc. Now, I always figure it out and clean up but can only notice beginners do that almost systematically. I am sure certain there are UI enhancements the Airtable team could implement to make people aware they are actually adding entries in a table.

You can mostly solve that problem by using interfaces, because interfaces lets you disable “inline record creation” — meaning that record creation can only happen if they click on a button that is physically removed from the records themselves.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

As mentioned by Scott above, interfaces should def solve that. Please let me know if you need any help setting that up. I’d be happy to show you around!

 

Best,

Mike 

Hm, a quick way you can try to prevent this using Table Permissions (screenshots below).  That way the beginners won’t be able to create records at all, and you can create a Form for them to do that if they need to

This is a bit clunky because you’ll need to create one Form per table and make sure everyone knows where the forms are.  For that, try creating an Overview type Interface and putting all the Form links in there

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If that sounds too clunky and having the new empty records isn’t breaking your workflows much, then you could try introducing an automation that runs once a week or something to find empty records that are a week old and delete them

And if that doesn’t work, then I’m afraid you’ll need to move everyone to Interfaces where:

  1. You can prevent them from creating new records
  2. The Forms required to create the records on each table will be easily accessible

 

 

 

I am aware of all the alternative ways to create records listed here and, of course, preventing records from being created is not the solution I am looking for either. The data view is a must as it is where a lot of the Airtable magic happens (for instance batch record creation via copy/paste). I am suggesting to tweak the UI, potentially by making the zone accepting a click to create a record much smaller (limiting to “+” sign would certainly help). Maybe also notifying empty records created a few hours ago via notification is another idea… I am not a UI expert, just reporting a clear issue I observed is definitely mainstream among users.

I haven’t had much of a problem with it, but you should definitely submit it as a feature request using the product idea feedback form. Also, note that you can still do batch record creation via copy/paste in interfaces — as long as you’re doing it within a “grid” visualization.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

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