Update records using pre-filled link in form

Your #1 best bet for this is to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it communicates directly with Airtable and can easily do everything that you requested.

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.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

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

Yeap this is doable!

Airtable has a guide on how to update records via a form found here: https://support.airtable.com/docs/use-case-update-records-via-a-form

And here's their guide on how to prefill forms: https://support.airtable.com/docs/prefilling-a-form-via-encoded-url

Airtable’s prefilled forms feature is extremely limited & uunwieldy, and you would need to continually & constantly regenerate a brand new link for people after every single update that they made.

Also, Airtable’s prefilled features don’t support all field types. For example, you can’t have it prefill an attachment field.

The only reliable, professional, customizable, and simple way to do this is to use Fillout. It is the only professional way of solving this problem.

— ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

re: you would need to continually & constantly regenerate a brand new link for people after every single update that they made.

Yeap, we'd have a formula field that would automatically generate them and we could send those out via an automation whenever there was an update!

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It's true that Airtable's prefill doesn't support all field types (I think attachments is the only one they don't support, actually?  Let me know if I'm wrong!), and in that situation we'd definitely need to use a third party app!  If not, avoiding third party apps and potential additional subscription costs is always nice!

Then you are depending on the person to ONLY click on the most recent link sent to them. If they click on an older link that was sent to them, they’re going to see outdated information in the form.

Furthermore, you have to create some crazy automations in Airtable to handle all of this.

All of this is built into Fillout for 100% free, and it doesn’t require building any complex prefilled links. Nor crazy automations. And the links never change.

You may be right that Airtable’s only limitation for prefilled forms is attachment fields, but it’s also challenging to create prefilled links for multi-select fields and linked record fields that have multiple values.

Fillout also offers hundreds (possibly thousands) of features that Airtable doesn’t have, including displaying formulas, lookups, and rollups on a form. It’s very cool… you should check it out!

It’s the only professional solution. 

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Thanks for the heads up!  I'm actually a big fan of Fillout and have recommended it in several threads here.  It's definitely a great tool for extending Airtable's capabilities.  Always happy to see more people appreciating it!

That’s great! And here’s another difference between Airtable’s prefilled links vs. Fillout’s prefilled links:

Airtable’s constantly-changing prefilled links might be hundreds of characters long, which looks very cluttered and can feel overwhelming to people. On the other hand, Fillout’s never-changing prefilled links are always short & concise.

Absolutely, I get that long URLs can be a bit much. One trick I use to keep things clean is embedding the links with descriptive text:

For HTML:

This will also display as "click here to submit" and keep your links looking neat and professional, regardless of the tool you're using!

For anyone else looking for a solution, you can use Plumsail Forms, which is directly integrated with Airtable.

Users can fill out a form, and the data will be saved directly to Airtable. You can also set up an automation to send users a link to the form, which they can then use to update their details.

If you need to collect files or signatures from users, Plumsail Forms supports that too. Plus, you can add custom CSS, HTML, or JavaScript, and Captcha on all plans, including the free one.