Hi

More knowledgable people than me will chip in I am sure but I’m afraid this is an often asked for feature of Airtable. I believe it was accidentally released by Airtable as a feature not long ago - then hastily redacted.

There are 4 ways to allow external collaborators to edit records in your Airtable base. Two of these ways cost money, and two of these ways are free:

1. (PAID) Use Airtable’s portals, which costs $120 per month for 15 users, and $8 per month for each additional customer after that.
    
2. (PAID)  Use a 3rd-party portal, which are typically less expensive than Airtable’s portals.
   
   The most popular portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
   Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.
   
   I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
    
3. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free 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.
   
   Fillout gives you a formula that you add to your Airtable base, which automatically creates a special URL for each record.
   
   Read-only users in Airtable are free, and they are allowed to click on URLs. (They are also allowed to click on buttons that take them to external URLs).
   
   So they would click on the the URL (or button) while looking at the record, which would take them to that record in Fillout.
   
   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.
    
4. (FREE) External read-only users can edit your Airtable records for free by triggering a custom webhook in Make, which would then automatically run an automation that marks that task as complete.
   
   Same setup as #3 above. You would create a formula in your Airtable base, which would automatically create a unique webhook URL for each record.
   
   Then, your read-only user would click on the URL (or button) while looking at the record in Airtable, which would then trigger the automation.
   
   I demonstrate how to do setup these custom webhooks in this Airtable podcast episode.
   
   Note that my podcast episode demonstrate this in the context of putting the custom webhook URL inside of an email, but you can skip that step.
   
   If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

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

Welcome to the Airtable community!

Yes and no. Various portals will let your users edit the data. However, thus far none of them allow inline editing in a table format. You need to open a special screen for editing one record at a time.

MiniExtensions.com allows inline editing for all field types in a table/grid format — including attachment fields and linked record fields!

Here’s an editable demo.

Scott, thanks for that demo from MiniExtensions. It is very close to what I would consider inline editing in a grid but not completely. There is still a pop-up editing window, but at least it only shows that one single cell.

Hey all, just an update - Glide is perfect! Thanks @ScottWorld thanks @kuovonne

That’s great to hear! I’ll have to check out Glide sometime soon — I’ve heard some good things about it.

Also, to update this old thread with a new portal option that my clients are loving:

Noloco is an even more advanced portal than Glide! It has more advanced options, and much better integrated support for Airtable!

I will be trying Noloco next. I must admit, the pricing model absolutely kills me as I have nearly ten thousand public users, and we are a small charity, so Noloco looks like it will get expensive fast.

Mini Extensions out of the box has been perfect for what we needed.

Softr is OK at first until you try to nest a linked record or have a form for that record. Then it's awful. (I still cant get over how they think that a conditional field form is like a groundbreaking innovation, and have people releasing YouTube affiliate video's about it as if they just discovered Atlantis . . it's a form, with conditional fields . . not Elvis)

Sorry, I digress.

if you want a Portal up and running in an hour, use Mini Extensions is my current thinking

For this out of the box, MiniExtensions will get you there, fast. Nesting embedded tables within a table is straight forward and you can control each field easily for display, security and searching, without a lot of stuffing around.

Softr is awful at it. Displaying is clunky as it is . . but linking records is like pulling teeth and requires a lot of manual line by line field work.

Glide looks great but also looks expensive fast depending on the user count.