Adding a User to Interface Only

HI @raghavsethi,

Thanks for that excellent clarification!

However, I'm able to successfully do it in the reverse order from what you mentioned. Although my method does require that the user has already signed up for their own Airtable account first.

I can add brand new users to the User field by choosing "Add Users By Email" (see screenshot below), and then invite them to the interface afterwards.

Although they are still required to "Request Access" from me to get into the interface.

So I can add them to the User field before inviting them to the interface.

Thoughts on this method?

You can do it in whatever order makes sense for your workflow. The reason I highlighted that specific ordering is that we've seen users get tripped up by the fact that they'd want to first make sure the data looks good for all their soon-to-be-invited interface and then invite them to collaborate. Since the collaborator field requires that those users already be collaborators (in self-serve plans) this doesn't work smoothly.

As you pointed out, email-based filtering as another option that would address this need.

Thanks so much, @raghavsethi! 🙂 One other question which came up above: Do you think that the wording of that checkbox in the Users field could be modified to provide a little more clarity to users?

I've passed your feedback on to the relevant team internally.

Thank you, @raghavsethi! 😀

how exactly can I use current user filter without having collaborators populate user fields in the Base tables? Without that, how can I link records to collaborators??

See my filtering in the Interface:

Has there been any further movement on this kind of issue? I really like the evolution of the interface development tool but am wary of building an interface that multiple clients access - especially clients that compete with one another. We've started to look at using other interface tools but would much prefer to stay on one platform if at all possible. 

On  business plans and above, you can now hide users from seeing the list of other users. Unfortunately, this is not available on the Teams plan.

Thanks Scott. I didn’t realize that was now an option. Missed it. Do you think noloco is still a better option for something like a client portal as compared to airtable with the options to hide users and sharing?

It depends on what you need.

I prefer to keep everything in Airtable as much as possible, because it’s simple/easy/uncomplicated.

However, Airtable’s feature set is extremely limiting, and it’s extraordinarily & unreasonably expensive if you open up your interfaces to editors.

Although you could save tons of money by combining Airtable’s interfaces with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free and offers literally hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records from a form, display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable rollup fields & Airtable attachments & formulas on forms, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, and so much more.

So if you need your external customers to edit their Airtable data but don’t want to pay Airtable’s extraordinary expenses for this, you could give them read-only access to your Airtable interface, and then for editing purposes, you can have your interface link them to their record in Fillout so they can edit their data there for free.

Regarding Noloco: Noloco is infinitely more powerful & significantly cheaper than Airtable, but it comes with such incredibly high levels of complexity & confusion that I don’t know if it’s worth using for the majority of use cases.

There are also much simpler portals than Noloco, such as Softr, JetAdmin, Pory, and Glide. Those might be worth exploring.

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