Form to edit data

The way I used to use this in Filemaker was to be able to stay in the form view and “flip” through the records in a fully expanded form layout. I loved the ability to change records while staying in a form view.

I really like the overall approach that AirTable has taken to UI. When compared to FileMaker, AirTable is clearly superior in many ways, but being able to step into an editable form view and use my screen real estate in a better way to view a single record in serious depth is a feature that I really miss from FileMaker.

I originally thought that you couldn’t flip between records in the expanded view, but I found the little carats. So yes, the expanded view might work in this case, but I think that the layout still isn’t quite as efficient as it could be. Take a look at this case:

The expanded view sits i the middle of the screen and makes me scroll down the list of fields which are nicely presented, but are padded so much that it’s not presented efficiently. I think that designing an expanded layout which can take advantage of the horizontal space on screen would be great.

But back to my original idea, which is a form view that is editable. The great thing about a dedicated form view rather than a better expanded view is the idea that it might be a bit more customizable when it comes to formatting, layout, etc. What most people in this thread area really asking about is the ability to create a layout that they can make work for the use case at hand. FileMaker took this concept to the extreme, and I don’t agree with that approach.

I’m a pretty heavy user of Cognito Forms, and I really like what they’ve done in this regard. They give the user some layout controls, but not so many that the design gets cluttered or is just terrible. Here’s an example of how their layout controls work:

You have a basic two column form, but you can expand or contract the fields horizontally, which is useful. You can move them around and resize them on the page. I’d love to see a form view with this type of customizability in AirTable.

This is a great request. This would make it so much easier for my clients / family members to use the Database applications I build for them.

The ability to embed forms and table views into a webpage means that I can easily create customized web apps for anyone. However, until we have the ability to let users update individual records, there are still going to be a lot of projects that Airtable simply will not work for : (

For our business this function would also be essential, we work in trading so we use a table to list all products we sell including selling and buying price, normally we would send update requests to suppliers for logistical information (size of shipping cartons etc.) of existing products, so sharing the whole table with them and letting them see our selling price is not feasible at all.

Hi! I can give more specifics as to what I’m looking to do. My non-profit works with many theater companies to develop deeper connections between them and the neighborhoods around them. We have over 200+ theater companies in Chicago, and just as many neighborhoods. I currently have a linked database of all the neighborhoods, and we have a list with most of the theater companies. What I would like to do is let theater artists to be able to let us know what company they work with and what neighborhood it’s in. But I don’t want thirty different entries for “American Theatre Company,” for example. I would like to create a from that allows people to see if a record for their company already exists and add info that’s missing, or add a new record (“company”) if it doesn’t.

This feature would be fantastic! I can provide an example of how we would use it. We store activity information for out of school programs at the start of each semester. Then, when we have an official list of students enrolled, they are added to the record for each activity. If I could provide users with a form for enrolling students that would be a huge help.

we run an annual conference. each session has associated data that is editable by administrators (like Room Assignment, Skill Level, etc) and data editable by Session Planners. A form would allow planners to be able to look up their sessions and make changes (say… a speaker needs to be removed) without having access to things they can break.

We have a few different scenarios where we want to use forms to allow certain people to edit data.

Scenario 1: The Collaborative Customer

This is the most common scenario we run into. We have a number of customers we attempt to collaborate with on Airtable. We’re currently letting the customer export their Airtable view, make edits to the CSV, and then submit back to us so that we can update the Airtable manually for them.

We need to restrict the customer to just their filtered view though because we track all our customers in one base and even on that same table.

I would be fine with allowing them to update their filtered view directly in Grid view via one of the public obfuscated share links. With that said, it would be better from the client perspective if we could give them a controlled easy-to-use interface to edit the data.

What we’re doing is tracking the employees at our customer’s companies that we provide our professional services to. We also track a number of other financial details around the services and subscriptions offered to those customers. Then we’re tracking equipment that belongs to each of these customers and that’s where our “Collaborative Customer” comes into play. Certain people at our customer’s offices want to be able to read/write to their list of equipment so that they can have a data conversation with us.

We already have their HR department add new “employees” via a form view, but it would be great if we could also have them remove “employees” via the form view we’re talking about now. Similarly, the technical contacts would use that form view to update the equipment for these employees.

Scenario 2: The Casual Colleague

The Casual Colleague is a common one for us. It’s someone on our staff we don’t want to train on using Airtable fully, and that we don’t want sifting through the all the data, but we do want them to be able to modify specific tables.

It seems like the ideal way to allow a colleague to edit the data with the least amount of training would be if we gave them an easy-to-use and self-explanatory form.

Scenario 3: The Private Collaborator

This is basically just like scenario 1, but some of our data is a little more private and we’d like to be able to invite guests to a form and force them to sign-up for an Airtable account. Better yet, I’d even love the ability to require that they confirm a cell phone and use 2FA. This would signal to our customers that we take the protection of their data seriously even though we’ve made it easily accessible to them.

Slightly on a tangent from this scenario but relevant to security. I would also really like a way to lock-down filtered views so that internal creators can’t accidentally expose information on a view by un-filtering data. It would be great if only owners could change filters on publicly shared views.

Conclusion

Like I said, I think the starting point is with editable (restricted) grid view for external collaborators.

Looking forward to seeing what’s next for Airtable. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to discuss further and/or have us test any of this.

I’m just wanting to throw my hat in the ring that this ability to edit records using forms is HIGHLY important. I work in an organization with a lot of volunteers and volunteer turnover. I don’t want to be putting people in front of rows and rows of data in a table. I want to have them search for a specific record, view it in the form, and edit information within that record in the form view, to avoid accidentally editing the wrong row/record when looking at many lines in a table.

This is a HUGE deal and a huge request that would greatly enhance my ability to use AirTable. Please don’t make me go back to using MS Access to support my organization. This is even a feature I’d be willing to pay small rate for a premium account to be able to use…

Any update from Airtable team about this request? To sum it up, account admin can have the ability to limit user access to specific data records and allow them to edit those records via a form. Not all users should be allowed to access the entire data table. This is one big important function that will make Airtable so much more powerful.

Thank you.

We love AirTable, but the ability to restrict users’ access to selected data and activities would be a massive improvement. If we had those abilities we would allow more people access to our database, which would mean more users and more revenue for Airtable.

We are a business services company and we would love for our field techs to be able to edit existing records (e.g. customer contact info) in the field without having to grant them access to the entire database with the ability to mass-delete records or tables.

We would prefer our users to be logged in when editing so we have audit history and so that only our employees can make changes - so we’d rather this functionality is accomplished within the app rather than with a form that doesn’t require login.

Following up to my comment a few moments ago, perhaps a solution would be to allow users’ access to be restricted to only certain Views when they login (without the ability to edit the settings of those Views). And within each of the Views they have access to, enable the ability to turn on or off their ability to a) add records, b) delete records, and c) edit records.

My org has different tier of users as well. Our workflow would greatly benefit from the ability to specify which fields to lock. I understand that changes are tracked for each item; however, when we’re dealing with thousands of row entries, it’s not possible for our small company to keep an eye out for each entry mistakes made. Thanks.

Since you asked for detailed examples of how we’d use this feature . . . I’m working with a volunteer organization which staffs a Helpline for the county agricultural agent. We would like to have volunteers log in for their shift, and to record Helpline calls from the public. Many of the volunteers are borderline computer-literate; if there was edit capability for specific views, this would allow volunteers to edit the records they populate, but there would be some control over unintended mistakes.

This needs to happen. Another use case…

We have a database for new students who will be joining our school, we have a table with a list of the student’s names and the schools they will be joining from, into each row I would like to add a bunch of other data but I want their current teachers at their current schools to do this.

Unless I want to give the teachers full access to wreak havoc with the data, the only option I have is to create a new table with a link to the records in the first table, have the teachers create new rows in that table and then export, correlate and import the data back into the original table which is going to be very time-consuming and prone to error.

EDIT: Possible Workaround

I’ve found a kind of way to do this based on my above suggestion.

1- Create a new table with a form which can link to a record in the table you want to edit data in (Here by edit I really mean fill out empty fields in an already existing row)

2- In the new table create a matching set of columns for the ones you wish to add data to in the original table and set them to “Lookup” data from the records as they are linked

3- Share a form to your second table

This way you can populate empty fields without giving access to the data which is already in the first table.

Hope this helps someone.

I would love (& expect) this to be as simple as passing a record_id to the form URL :pray:

+1 for editing records using a form!

I’d like to have this feature too.

Specifically… I have a team of 4 translators I work with to translate English (promotional/sales copy) into 4 different languages. I cannot (at least don’t know how to) do that with Forms because it’ll create a new row for each entry. I thought allowing them to edit the entries could be another option. But there are so many columns that the view gets a little cluttered. I’m thinking to create Table 2, just for these translations, and then using the Lookup field in Table 1, to automatically populate the fields. I’d prefer not to have an extra table just for that.

Advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

I have been looking for the capabilities that everyone here has noted. It’s pretty plain what we need. Is there any chance you will be adding this Editable -AutoFilled Form feature soon?

I need it for current contacts ordering a gift. Need them to confirm email, name and address is correct, then choose a gift from a pull down menu.

We really do need this functionality too.

We would use it to have clients provide us with certain information related to a specific record. They would need to have access to a few pre-populated fields within a record, and then to be able to edit additional blank fields to complete the record.

Thanks to Michael Crinnion for the possible workaround in the meantime.

But please, Airtable, this is such a crucial use case of your otherwise brilliant product!

Here is my use case:
I want team member Camille to not be able to edit almost any data in the base. But, weekly, Camille fills out a form for each of her projects that updates/edits the Key Accomplishments and Key Challenges fields for her project. These fields show up in my Kanban board view which I (the only person with full access to the base) use as a dashboard to assess the status of each project.

Here’s what I’ve tried:
I have created a base that contains information about every project our team is working on. I am using “table:Main” to create a Kanban board that shows me which projects every team member is point person for. One of the fields in “table:Main” is “field:Key accomplishments for this week.” I don’t need to see any past “field:key accomplishments” reports, so I would rather not create a blank field for each weekly report, I want my team to just be able to edit their projects, no one else’s, and I don’t want them to be able to edit certain fields for their projects (project goals, main deliverables).

I can, and have, created a “Reports” table, where the main field is today’s date (the date team member is submitting the report), and the second field links to the “field:Projects” in the “table:Main” table. Third field in “Reports” is the “field:Project Goals” from “table:Main.”

In form view of “table:Reports” I then want a text field that fills (i.e. overwrites) “field:Key accomplishments for this week” in “table:Main”

I am struggling to see a work around where the “field:Key accomplishments” in “table:Main” is the most recent entry from “table:Reports”

Without the ability to edit fields via form (as opposed to creating a new record), does anyone have a formula for searching the “table:Reports” for the most recent entry (probably with a calculated/formula field using dates) for each “field:Project” and then using a lookup field for that record in “table:Reports” to fill “field:Key accomplishments” in “table:Main”?

I’ll another use case that I could use this feature for. I run a collegiate outdoors program. One of our biggest programs is a wilderness orientation program. For that, we have students register not long after they accept their spot at the school. That registration creates a row in a “Participants” table. However, not all students who register end up coming - there are other programs they may choose to do. So, about a month after registering we ask all students to confirm they are going to participate, and if they are, we ask for some preferences about the type of trip they would like to go on.

As I see it, I need a way to student to check back in with us and give us her preferences, but those preferences need to be linked to the initial “Participants” record. A modifiable, pre-filled form would work. Or, if there is another way I can do this, I’m open to all ideas.

Hi Benjamin,
I agree! I have wanted this feature for quite a while, and it would be incredibly useful!
Julien

I agree this enhancement would take Airtable to a whole new level. Currently is only data capture / transactional data, being able to all ‘end user edit’ would be great.

Bump for this idea. More specifically, what I’d really like is to be able to add a field to a table that auto-generates a unique URL for editing the record, using a form view. That way, I can send a personalized email to each of my club members, inviting them to click the link to edit their contact info. This would be ideal for me because it would give me the opportunity to enable my members to self-care for their data without needing to issue and manage passwords for each of them.

Is there any news on this feature from the Airtable team? @Katherine_Duh, @Howie ?

Agree, we just did a custom job for a client that was basically this exactly. (using custom forms over the API). This feature would have saved them a bunch of money.