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We are evaluating Airtable for use as a flexible project management system. A significant part of our workflows concern the intake, organization and review of PDF documents (e.g, correspondence, memos, progress reports, etc.).

We have a firm grasp on how Airtable can help us with respect to the intake and organization workflows for PDFs as attachments. However, we are struggling with using Airtable to efficiently review PDFs, which is largely a product of our inability to display full resolution (or near full resolution) views of PDFs.

The "record review" interface layout would be nearly perfect for our PDF review workflow if we could immediately display a full resolution view of PDF attachments when the record review interface is first opened without the need to click on the attachment, wait for it to open, and only then be presented with the full resolution view of the PDF.

Based upon my search of this forum, it appears several people have requested the ability to incorporate full resolution views of PDFs. Some of those posts discuss generating URLs to the full resolution PDFs using the following:

MID({Attachment Field}, FIND('dl.airtable.com', {Attachment Field}), LEN({Attachment Field}) - FIND('dl.airtable.com', {Attachment Field}))

 

The above formula creates a URL but it leads to a page stating "The link you're trying to visit is not available. Please visit our support center for more information."

 
Native support for this functionality would be a spectacular long term solution. If anyone has a short term solution, we would love to hear about it.
 
The following are the inquiries and requests re the same or similar issue with Airtable’s preview resolution of attachments:
 
 
 
 
I stopped after a couple pages of search results.

As outlined in this support article, you can no longer use a formula to reference an attachment’s URL.

You can either use a script, an internal Airtable automation, or an external Airtable automation to place the expiring URL into another field. After somebody clicks on the URL, it will expire after 2 hours.

Alternatively, you can store your PDFs in a cloud drive and store the link to the cloud drive in Airtable.

As outlined in this support article, you can no longer use a formula to reference an attachment’s URL.

You can either use a script, an internal Airtable automation, or an external Airtable automation to place the expiring URL into another field. After somebody clicks on the URL, it will expire after 2 hours.

Alternatively, you can store your PDFs in a cloud drive and store the link to the cloud drive in Airtable.


Thank you for the suggestions! I am going to work on syncing attachments with a cloud drive and then designing an interface template for reviewing docs that incorporates links to the cloud drive.

This issue is particularly frustrating because Airtable's native resolution for previewing PDFs is very close to adequate for 95% of our PDF files. It would take only a slight improvement of resolution to be sufficient for our purpose.

I'll make sure to follow up with what worked for us and what didn't.

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