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Copying text from formula in Interface to Gmail looses line breaks after sending

  • October 13, 2025
  • 4 replies
  • 67 views
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Here’s the scenario: 

I have a long text field (called ‘Email Draft with Placeholder’), and a formula field (called ‘Email Draft’) where I’m replacing a few placeholder key using REGEXREPLACE.

I’m then displaying ‘Email Draft’ in a Record Review in the Interface. Here, it displays as expected, maintaining the new line breaks.

If you copy that text (by dragging across it and CMD+C), and paste it into a Gmail new email, it all still looks good.

But if I send the email, and look at what was sent, all the new lines are gone! 😱

I’d be really grateful if anyone could explain what’s going on here, and how I can fix it! 

4 replies

TheTimeSavingCo
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Hm interestingly, when I copy from the formula field and paste into a Gmail compose window the line breaks don’t get copied over for me

As a workaround, I tried creating another long text field, pasted into that:

And then if I copy the value from the long text field and paste into Gmail, it looks fine and after sending the linebreaks are kept too

Adam, Airtable Consultant - thetimesaving.company
ScottWorld
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  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • October 13, 2025

​@serenalambert2 

That is so strange! What a bizarre bug that you have discovered!

For what it’s worth, if you copy and paste the formula field into an email app — such as Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook or even the Gmail app itself on mobile devices — it works just fine!

The problem only crops up when copying from the formula field directly into the Gmail website!

This is so weird! I wonder if this is a Gmail bug or an Airtable bug or both? You may want to report this as a bug to support@airtable.com.

In the meantime, it looks like you can workaround this bug in one of these ways:

  1. Use the trick that Adam outlined above.
     
  2. Use an email app instead of the Gmail website.
     
  3. You can click on a button in Airtable to trigger a Make Gmail automation which would create a new draft message for you in Gmail. Then, you could switch over to the Gmail website and open up that draft message.

    If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

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

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  • henry567cowan
  • New Participant
  • October 14, 2025

Here’s the scenario: 

I have a long text field (called ‘Email Draft with Placeholder’), and a formula field (called ‘Email Draft’) where I’m replacing a few placeholder key using REGEXREPLACE.

I’m then displaying ‘Email Draft’ in a Record Review in the Interface. Here, it displays as expected, maintaining the new line breaks.

If you copy that text (by dragging across it and CMD+C), and paste it into a Gmail new email, it all still looks good.

But if I send the email, and look at what was sent, all the new lines are gone! 😱

I’d be really grateful if anyone could explain what’s going on here, and how I can fix it! 

Hello ​@serenalambert2,
This issue likely stems from how Gmail interprets line breaks—what looks like a newline visually may actually be a soft break (`\n`) that gets stripped on send. To preserve formatting, try converting line breaks to HTML `<br>` tags in your formula field, and ensure the email is sent as HTML. That should maintain the intended structure in the final email.

Best Regards,
Henry Cowan

ScottWorld
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  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • October 14, 2025

No, that wont work, because a formula field only displays text, so it would just interpret the HTML tags as text.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

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