Interface Page Limit

Wow. That is completely & totally messed up. That is completely misleading. Sadly, this is also incredibly typical for Airtable.

I’d also hazard a guess that each sidesheet design and each new record form are also pages. 

I've started a conversation on this topic here as well.

Always helps to reference the official manual link;

https://support.airtable.com/docs/interface-designer-overview

Unfortunately, the manual doesn't clearly detail what constitutes as a page, and how this limitation that you've reach could be encountered.

I haven't personally reached this limit with my production interfaces - but am now a little worried and might have to check how close we are.

@Karl_L  Yes the Official Manual link was the first place I referenced and that's actually what lead me to more uncertainty. 

I'm still waiting for support to provide clarification, but I think that @kuovonne is correct in her suspicion that the "page counts" are not only the pages themselves and the Data Visualization inside those pages, but ALSO the unique "side sheet design".

I think this is the case because I did a manual count of all my PAGE + Data Visualizations (inside the pages) and even then it only equalled 32. So now I'm going to add up the unique side-sheet designs and see where those numbers add to. 

The more I investigate this the more misleading the "50 pages" description is in the Airtable manual. 

Thank you for reporting back. This is a useful list. However, none of the people you tagged work for Airtable and this have no say.

I recommend you contact support with your findings. In my experience, getting documentation updated can happen faster than product changes. 

@kuovonne  Thanks, I actually just tagged you all because I knew you'd likely be interested as fellow users.

I've already been in contact with the Airtable official support, but they seem to be really struggling so far to understand what I'm talking about haha. I've responded back and forth a few times with them trying to explain it, attached screenshots etc., but so far haven't gotten to a point yet where they seem to understand the issue I'm asking about.

(You all understood pretty quickly on the other hand haha!)

I'm sure someone from Airtable will eventually respond as I'm sure the first handful of emails via their support system has possibly been just Ai Support Bots' algorithmic responses (even the direct email ones). Usually, that's fine and can answer more general questions, but I think I need an actual human to address this specific issue. Hopefully soon 🙂

@JakeD Yeah, it’s sad that Airtable Support takes such a long time to respond to customer support emails — if they ever respond at all. And if/when they do respond, the replies are largely unhelpful.

The expert Airtable consultants (such as myself and @kuovonne) typically know significantly more about Airtable than the people who work at Airtable themselves. This is one of the many reasons why I created TableForums: The Airtable Discussion Community. It’s a place where people can get extremely quick support & highly accurate answers from true Airtable experts who care about Airtable — and it’s also designed to be the place where real conversations & real connections can thrive. In fact, it’s the only web-based forum that I know of where many of the Airtable consultants & Airtable experts spend their time. And all of us are volunteering our time, too.

Of course, for Airtable's interfaces, Airtable would need to update their documentation and/or remove these limitations. I would recommend going to this support page on interfaces, scrolling down to the very bottom, clicking on the “No / thumbs down” button, and submit feedback about changing the article to reflect the reality of this situation. Airtable used to have employees who updated those support articles based on feedback through the thumbs down button, but nobody has updated the support articles based on user feedback in nearly 2 years.

To workaround Airtable's interface limitations, I would highly recommend using an external portal/interface tool for Airtable, such as Noloco.

The CEO of Noloco gave a demonstration of his product on this Airtable podcast episode: https://youtu.be/yyJSHijFD7g?si=7CJzR935EJps9Vl6

I also give a brief tutorial of Noloco on this Airtable podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jwb0CFJ2qY&list=PLqssva4liHRwHhQIpTXekG8WObEoyC2F1

And I also presented a full one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

You can also get a lot of this same functionality from Fillout's advanced forms for Airtable, which lets you update Airtable records from a form.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld 

Much appreciated @ScottWorld. I'm just glad I was at least able to figure it out after hours of reverse engineering and troubleshooting. So at least now we know what the TRUE limitation is (and I hope it's helpful to others with this thread at least here).

I'm going to bookmark that TableForums page!

(I'm Phil and I work on the Product team at Airtable. 👋)

Thanks for highlighting this issue and sharing the thorough writeup of your investigation, @JakeD.

To clarify one point in some of the earlier posts, using different visualisations (e.g. a List and a Grid and a Calendar) on one page does not influence the page limit. No matter the number of visualisations used, that still only counts as one page.

As @kuovonne suggested and you confirmed, distinct layouts used for forms (that appear in centred modal dialogs, when you allow "Users to add records") and record detail pages (that appear as full pages or in sidesheets, when you allow users to "Click into record details") also count towards the page limit. That is a confusing experience - as you noted - because you're unable to manage these through the overall list of pages, and this doesn't line up with what's specified in our support documentation.

We're actively investigating improvements we can make here. I'll provide an update when we have something to share.

Thanks a lot Phil, and yes that all sounds right from what I eventually narrowed down to as well. Which is ok, it makes sense now that I understand it.

I agree it could just use a bit more clarification on the website so other folks who run into the same issue will be able to understand why prior to a lengthy troubleshooting process haha!

Much appreciated Phil!

Update: we've changed the logic so that layouts for forms that appear in modal dialogs and record detail pages no longer count towards the page limit for an Interface. The page limit now only applies to pages that you can see and manage in the list of all pages in that Interface.

Thanks again @JakeD for highlighting this issue and pushing us to make the Interfaces experience better!

@Phil_Rose I'm really appreciative and impressed that you and your team have done that. 

And honestly, so quickly too since the issue was first noticed! Really, amazing stuff.

Please pass along my appreciation to the rest of the team.