If you’re looking for the easiest and quickest way of doing this, I would recommend using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable. Fillout is 100% free and it allows your users to type in their own brand new option for single-select fields (if you enable that feature).
However, all of this can be done natively in Airtable as well.
As you said, you can use a text field and then update your single-select field by simply inserting the value into the field.
You can do this through either: (1) Airtable’s native automations (no scripting necessary), or (2) scripting, or (3) Make’s Airtable automations.
if you’re using Airtable’s API, be sure to enable the “typecast” option, which is called “Smart Links” in Make.
You can also do the same thing with a linked record field. Additionally, for a linked record, you have these options:
1. On the first form, give the user a link to another form which will add new records to the linked table.
2. This one is the same approach as a single-select field: On the first form, in the linked record field, give the user an option to choose from that is called “other” or “new option” or something like that. Then, conditionally show additional fields where they can type in the new information. Then, use an automation to add the new record into the appropriate table (or insert into the field, if it’s a single-select field).
3. Use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which already has this functionality natively built into its forms. Fillout offers hundreds of advanced features that aren’t natively available in Airtable’s native forms, including adding new linked records and adding new single-select options.
Fillout is 100% free, and it also gives you the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, customize the style and branding of your form, customize a theme for your form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, 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:
Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
