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I’d like to have a progress bar (from a percentage field) on displaying the live progress on our website. I’m having a surprisingly hard time finding tool that will actually allow me to do this. Obviously I can do it by embedding an interface, but I only need (and want) the progress bar from the specific record embedded. Airtable interfaces aren’t customisable enough to remove the extra fluff.



There must be a third party tool that can turn a simple piece of data into progress bar - any pointers for a tool to try?

 

Softr could do it, but unfortunately the embed block option is at a higher subscription tier than we can justify. $139/mo is a bit pricey to display a progress bar.

For those of you who are not aware, Airtable has hidden an undocumented “progress bar” feature into 2 types of fields: the percentage field and the formula field (as long as your formula always results in a number, and never results in anything else).

You can access this progress bar feature by clicking on the “formatting” tab within the field’s settings.

Airtable lets you see this progress bar everywhere that Airtable lets you view data: in the data layer, in interfaces, in shared views, in embedded views, in embedded interfaces, in shared interfaces, etc.

However, as ​@oreocereus pointed out above, formatting features are not accessible via Airtable’s REST API. Only the underlying data (i.e. numbers, strings, dates, arrays, and URLs) is accessible via the API.

As a workaround, there is a little-known trick to create your own progress bars using emoji characters in a formula field.

And since emoji characters are simply strings of text, they will show up anywhere, including the REST API.

However, one caveat is that depending on the browser, the emojis might not always visually display the way that you would want them to appear. For example, you can often see tiny little spaces between the emoji characters.

In any case, I give a demonstration on how to do all of this on this Airtable podcast episode:

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld


Hey ​@oreocereus,

 

If you ONLY want the progress bar, there is no easy way to just embed it without embedding the view/interface. 

 

You could however have some custome code probably to achieve that with only a few lines of code. What are you running your site on?

 

Mike


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