Legacy Product Ideas

If you ask me what’s the biggest difference between Microsoft Excel and Access I would say the ability to write anywhere in Excel vs the rigid column definition of data in Access. Excel is so simple and most people use Excel as a database anyway. Database purists would point out lots of disadvantages doing this but Excel is popular because it is WYSIWYG: after you put data in the table, add a title in the row above the table and set the font size / bold / underline. Add a second table directly below the first one, also with a freetext title. No table definitions, messing with report layouts, records, joining tables, union… etc. If you share the spreadsheet with your team, write BIG RED TEXT on the first row telling them what to do/not to do. Again it doesn’t mess up the table definition or requiring a pop-up code to display this extra text. Simple. Effective. It leads me to think if there could be a way to be able to achieve this in Airtable. Say I want to segment my rows into sections

Airtable is letting me do about 95% of what I need for creating an app for recruiters to review job seeker profiles. I made the resume the cover image, but even in the record detail view you can’t read the text in the image. If I could write some custom CSS it would give me so much flexibility to fix this and a whole range of other issues! It’s such a bummer when a platform is SO close to doing what you need but then you have to go write the whole thing from scratch because there’s one critical thing missing that could be fixed with a CSS override. Custom scripts would also be A+! Squarespace allows this and it makes so much possible. They specify that they can’t support pages with custom code, which is fine with me. I’m going to use Espresso to make the changes. If that works as well as I hope, then I’ll investigate making a browser extension which will allow those overrides to be shared with our team. Thanks for the excellent product. I’ve not been this excited about a new platform i

Reading through support.airtable articles, I noticed a couple of typography tweaks that would make the articles a way easier onscreen read: (1) Tighten the leading between characters. (2) Lower the line height by I think 1 pt. Right now, the leading and line height are so wide that rivers appear throughout the pages. It’s a really nice, straightforward sans serif font Airtable’s using; there’s just too much space in it. Looking at the page as a whole, you can see that the bright white background surrounding each character causes the bellies of very spacious letters, like c’s and b’s, and the crossbars of lower case f’s and t’s to disappear. Addressing this will enhance the page’s readability, encourage people to read an article all the way through, and then take on a new article. Right now, it hurts my eyes. If you’re using a font from adobe typekit or google fonts, you should be able to make these changes pretty easily in the CSS.

First-off, thank you for Calendar View!!! It is great for tracking things like the drop-dead artwork release date for a bunch of jobs. But it’s not so great for tracking multiple dates associated with just one record. Would you consider (or are you developing) a single-record/multi-field calendar view? Something like that would be MUCH more useful for calendarizing complex project management schedules with individual deliverables (like say a printed catalog or photo shoot). As always, thanks! A.

I’m really enjoying using airtable. I’ve been using dapulse but i find airtable much more versatile. currently if i want to edit a field, i have to click once to select/focus on the row, then click again to edit/modify the field. It would be great if there was an preference option to just click once to edit the field, inferring that where my mouse is is the row i want to edit. Specifically “single select” enum fields. i found that this contributed to a huge sense of ease and responsiveness that I felt when using dapulse, and that would go a long way for myself and my coworkers. it would mean doing same amount of work in half the number of clicks, which is from a pleasure-to-use pov huge.

I just noticed that base descriptions aren’t visible when sharing read-only views of Airtable bases. When hovering over the base title in read only view, the only info that pops up is the selfsame title. The base definitely has a description that’s visible in-app and browser, but it doesn’t show upon sharing. Column descriptions seem to transfer over fine, but not base descriptions. As I’d like to add notes and descriptive info for folks looking into my shared base views, is this something you’d be willing to implement? (I realize I might be totally overlooking this functionality if it indeed already exists!)

From what I’ve seen so far, the fields in Airtable are horizontal or vertical. Either one causes lots of scrolling on large tables. Is or will there be a way users can configure the tables to have related fields on the same line? A person could Drag and drop the fields to the location they want. For example: Mr. John Doe 1234 Main St. Anywhere all be on the same line and other data be below it. I also noticed unless I put my cursor is on the scroll bar I can’t scroll.

I tried searching but didn’t see anything. This would tie into being able to edit a individual record. If the record has data tied to it in a sub table, it would be preferred to view that data in a table format in the individual record view. For example I am working on setting up a asset database. I would like to have a relational table for the asset that holds all of the zendesk tickets for that asset in a table format so I can see ticket details without having to open up each individual ticket record.

Please can we have the ability for field type showing “All linked records” e.g. if a record in base A could be linked to one in base C and another in base D, for these to appear in a single column.

Hi, It would be great if two tables could share the same ID as a primary key. For example, say we have a client table and a sole trader table. Not all clients are sole traders, some are limited companies or even individuals. At the moment in time I have a redundant column that acts as a primary key, but the primary key should be the client ID. Thanks in advance

Today I can create a view and then get a URL for this view to be embedded. It would be awesome to be able to pass parameter to the URL to customize the view “live” when it’s displayed to users. when I generate the view link it would customize the parameters for me, but they would be more or less human readable so that i can change them in my code. Example (space added for readability) https://airtable.com/embed/UNIQUE-ID-FOR-TABLE/? fields=A,B,C & filter=A, contains, hello & filter=B, doesnotcontain, bye%20bye & C, greaterthan, 3 & filter=C, smallerthan, 5

I have not really used the app that much for this reason. The scroll bar in Android in my nicely-big-display-size phone is really thin and I don’t even know if it can be used to manually scroll. So the only benefit I see for it is to see how far down you’re viewing records. I have 3000+ records in some tables, which makes scrolling a pain. Can you make a working/wider (whichever applies) scrollbar? Or another way to scroll?

I made this a feature request, as it appears from Help documentation that it cannot currently be done. I have dates in one table which are in a lookup field (so Assets in a table of assets find out their deadline from the deadline of the project in which they’re included (Projects are in a separate table). So I want to show the Assets in a Calendar view showing when they need to be done, but the date field for the calendar view isn’t a Date field—technically it’s a Lookup field—so it doesn’t show as an available date. If I copy the value from the Lookup field to a dummy Date field I run into the problem Y_K posted: that a Formula Field doesn’t work (either) for the purposes of the Calendar view. Basically, Airtable users need to use any field formatted as Date as input for the Calendar View. Thank you!! Airtable is miraculous. (And PLEASE don’t let anyone buy the company!)

First off, what an awesome platform you guys are developing! I’m a die-hard Excel fan, and even use Excel Online. But this is posing to be a real threat to that. I have a suggestion for a field type that I, and probably others, would find useful. Sometimes I like to use little icons (but not checkmarks) as data in fields. Kind of like tags, but image-based. Multi select or single select choices would be cool too. As far as the icons themselves, you could start with some basic ones: a star, exclamation mark, up/down arrows, basic emoticons. And you could allow users to create/upload their own. Anyway, just a thought. Keep up the great work!

It’s fantastic that the Airtable team is so receptive to feature requests. Realistically though, many of the requests now being made are for niche things desired by a small percentage of your userbase. I see many parallels between Airtable and Wordpress, particularly in how easy it can be for a non-developer to get up and running with a system that does most of what they need. It’s awesome to have such a robust API that lets you pull information out of Airtable really easily, but I get the sense that what a lot of users are after is a way to do more within the Airtable environment rather outside of it. I think Airtable is reaching a point a lot of these feature requests could be reacted to faster in the hands of third-party developers. A plugin library really could have the effect that launching the App Store did for the iPhone. Time and time again I’ve seen users in these forums saying ‘the lack of x feature is the only thing stopping our whole organisation from using Airtable’ and th

It would be amazing if we could restrict linking records to only ones that appear in a specific view, and also if we could disable creating new records if one wasn’t found.

To make grocery lists, packing lists, and other forms of check lists efficient on handheld devices a user needs to be able to quickly work their way down a pre-made list checking off items that have been completed. Currently the only way to change the state of a checkbox is to open each item on the list individually. Please consider enabling checking / unchecking of check boxes from the list views.

Please remove sorting as a default requirement for creating groups. It seems totally unnecessary, and is problematic. Why does the Group function require sorting? If I create, say, 100 entries in 10 categories, why can’t I group them by category in the order I entered them? Currently, AT automatically orders them alphabetically, with my only options being A-Z or Z-A. Alphabetical ordering is often completely inappropriate to the content! This means I have to do a clunky workaround by creating an artificial numbered column just to get them to stay in the correct order. The Group function and the Sort function should be wholly independent. Please fix. Thanks!

I commonly have fields with 15 or so options. I usually design the options elsewhere and then put them here. My issue is that I am not able to paste multiple options at the same time. Even if I select multiple cells, either in Airtable or a spreadsheet application, and paste into the options box, it puts all the cell contents in one option instead of creating multiple options. To give a concrete example, consider the following table. Options Description High High chance of conversion Medium Medium chance of conversion Low Low chance of conversion I select the three options in the first column and paste into the options part of a field’s configuration screen. My problem is that I get something like this: High Medium Low as one option, rather than three options. Could you please have this become three options?

Having different Views per table is great, but it would be great to have a curated menu (maybe as a Block in the left side) of views, as a simple & friendly UI for accesing different parts of the base/app. It doesn’t have to be a full tree-like structure, it can be 2 or 3 levels deep, maybe the first level being a category, defined by the table name. Custom icons/names would be a plus++

It would be awesome to have “master” views from which others can be derived/scoped, a.k.a. sub-views based on other views! A use-case of my own: I have a highly customized view I use all the time, it has lots various filters, groupings, hidden fields, sorts, … Sometimes I need to filter this view by an specific requirement (ex. a time span). Currently I have a duplicated view of the original with the added filter. Nevertheless, if I change something in my original view I have to remember to change it in the sub-view as well.

Hello Airtablaryens, I can’t believe that I took so long to discover Airtable. But now that we have one another in each others lives, the rest is history. Now, feature request; I just created a “frequency” - Single Select - column for when subscribed payments would occur, with the options Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Annually. Next to this column is a “Payment” currency column for the input of currency. And finally next to that is an “Annual Total” Formula column, where; Annual Total = Payment * Frequency That’s the moment when I realised, that I’ll need nested IF loops to get the job done, as Weekly = 52, Fortnightly = 26, Monthly = 12, Annually = 1… Yet this would be so much easier & neater if I could use a switch statement - Select Case. en.wikipedia.org Switch statement In computer programming languages, a switch statement is a type of selection control mechanism used to allow the value of a variable or expression to change the control flow of program e

Most of my tables are sorted by chronological date. I’m having two issues with Airtable’s handling of dates that currently functions better in Google Sheets. In Google Sheets, I prefer ISO format for dates, but can enter a date of September 8th simply as “9/8” hit return and the date willl convert to “2017-09-08” automatically. Although I prefer ISO dates, typing the full year and hyphen can become tedious after filling a multitude of fields. In Google Sheets, if I have a range of dates, for example, all the days of the month of September, I can create the first cell of 2017-09-01, and in the bottom right corner if I drag down then it will autofill in date chronologically (2017-09-02, 2017-09-03, etc.) Would be ideal if Airtable devs could implement these features. Thanks.

@Katherine_Duh Somehow I missed the What’s New announcement of WORKDAY() — or, more likely, I saw it, but it didn’t sink in as I wasn’t working on anything related at the time. Just last night, though, I posted an example database in response to a Support question, and in the base description I noted three things that should be fixed before putting my admittedly ‘toy’ base into production. One had to do with bullet-proofing the formula I wrote to find the previous workday to a given date; I mentioned some provision likely should be made for identifying holidays or other non-workdays that fell within the business week. After seeing your Announcements post on the new ratings field, I went to see if there was anything else listed in ‘What’s New’; that’s when I noticed the entry on WORKDAY(). Reading through it, I noted with excitement the information on the optional holidays parameter. “If only WORKDAY() would take a negative value for numDays,” I thought, “it would be perfect for this ba

Airtable automatically creates a Sum for Number, Currency and Autonumber fields, even though it sometimes doesn’t provide any useful information. For some numeric info, I’ve used a “Single line text” field to avoid having to change a useless Summary in several Views. How about if numeric fields had an option for a “default” summary, with “None” as one of the options? Any new View with that field would display the default summary. This could also be useful for non-numeric fields, e.g. it would sometimes be nice to have an “Empty” or “Filled” summary for all Views that have a particular field. Thanks.