Show and Tell

It’s a quiet Saturday in my office and while I should be working on a client’s project, I found myself intrigued reading the various responses to Airtable customer requests for help from consultants. Some of them had me chuckling and others were simply boring. A few even triggered yawns from time-to-time despite being hopped up on Black Rifle Coffee. This post is yet another tell, and no show. Just a few tips from an old dude who’s written about 41.8 million lines of code. I’m an analytics guy, so yeah - I pretty much know how many lines of code I’ve written since 1978. Being this old and this “seasoned” in the fine art of crafting software, I get away with saying stuff that might come off as crude or insensitive. But, my candour might also help you avoid some blind spots. Feel free to push back on these highly opinionated p

Hello All, I am looking for a good article that explains what a Airtable base is? When I look at https://airtable.com/pricing Records per Base seems to be the main difference between Free, Plus and Pro? That leads to the question, what is a Base?

Hi Is it possible to add a condition to trigger an action (like hyperlink redirection, e-mail, …) after changing the data from a specific field? Cheers, Marcelo

Just posted a 7 Wonders scoring app built in Airtable to Airtable Universe. Airtable

Hi everybody, I use Airtable as a CRM to track all my contacts and interactions. It is pretty neat that I am able to open up a contact in expanded view and view a list of interactions I had with this contact. However, I had to manually click into each individual interaction to view the information I needed. The entity-relationship is as follows: Each Contact may have multiple Interaction Each Interaction has 4 key fields namely Date, Method, Notes, Next Steps My objective was to put all my interactions for each contact into a single column for quick viewing. To set this up, I did the following steps: In the Interactions table, create a new column named “Interaction Summary” with ‘Formula’ as the column type. Create your formula as follows and customise according to your needs: Formula: “\n” & CONCATENATE("[",DATE

If you’re like me, you like to catalog things. Like, perhaps, your movies. And you’re going to want to sort them by title. Which is no big deal… until you get to all of those movies that start with “The.” You don’t really want all of them in a lump in the T section, right? You’ve gotten spoiled by programs like iTunes that somehow ignore the word “The” when sorting. Thanks to Airtable’s formula columns and string-handling capabilities, you can achieve the same effect. Let’s say you’re storing your movie titles in the Name column. All you need to do is: Look at the first four characters of the title. If the first four characters are "The " - chop them off, then add “, The” to the end of the title. Otherwise, just return the title as is. This function: IF(LEFT(Name, 4) = "The ", RIGHT(Name, LEN(Name) - 4) & “, The”, Name) does just that. Sort on this column, and you’re all set. Hide the column if you don’t feel l

With all the live-streaming meetings that my family currently has, I wanted a one week rotating calendar, where I could enter all the events for a week and the events would always show up for the current week indefinitely, without creating any new records. Then everyone could subscribe to the shared calendar in their favorite calendar app. Here is a simplified version of the base that I created. Airtable

Hey everyone, Just wanted to share with you a base that I have been working on that would match between volunteers and cases during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Please check out the video below. This base can be used by any organization/community that is looking to automate a part of there efforts to help their fellow humans during these hard times. There is still a lot that can be done and Im sure you guys with much more experience than me in Airtable would have many useful insights on how to make it better. One of the things that I cannot solve is when someone wants to use the base they would have to redo all the zaps. Maybe it would be better achieved by Script Block ? Looking forward for your feedback. BR, Mo

Hello all! Wanted to share something we’ve been working since early last year: the first and only (so far!) Airtable-themed podcast in the world. :world_map: The BuiltOnAir podcast in a sentence: we get amazing people on the show to talk about what they’re making, why they use Airtable, then demonstrate actual databases they’ve built. In addition to meeting a fellow enthusiast, as the audience you get to see real examples of Airtable at work or play, demonstrated by the creator themself. While many of the examples are actual use-cases from internal systems in their businesses, you’d be surprised how many guests share a database they built to keep track of their house plants. It’s fun. Each episode dives into the following :woman_mechanic: Who the guest is and what made them attracted to using Air

Here is a strategic vendor selection tool that I created a while back. Some of you might find this useful when comparing a number of potential vendors for a project or as a supplier of goods. Enjoy! Airtable

In light of these unprecedented times, we’ve been amazed to watch our Airtable community and champions rally, creating COVID-19 related bases in efforts to support individuals, industries, and local communities. To ensure we can circulate these resources as broadly as possible, our team will be creating a catalog of resources for re-use in our Community Mobilization category in Airtable Universe. If you’ve created a base you think others might find useful, you can share that base with us, along with best practices for use, by mentioning @airtable in your social channels (Instagram & Twitter) or by sharing the base directly right here in our community forum. You can also post the base in

Hi Everyone :wave: We tried to look for a good way to edit existing records using forms, and couldn’t find a good one. So, we wrote down all the things we didn’t like about the existing implementations and tried to make the best possible solution, so here we go: miniExtensions

Hello! We’ve all been busy enjoying the holidays, but it’s a new year and it’s the best time to get your finances in order—whether for your business or your household. We’ve seen great things come from the community forum and we want your help make better budgeting tools in Airtable. If you’ve got a great idea, please share it with us! Here’s what you need to know: Show us a great way to use Airtable to create a budget (or anti-budget). You don’t have to be an Airtable expert. Check out this template and guide for a helpful starting point. For extra credit: we’d love to see bases that use linked records,

With schools closed and many students switching to school-at-home, it can be difficult for both students and their parents to keep track of all the assignments and live online classes they suddenly find themselves having. This base blends time-tested practices used for years by many school-at-home and homeschooling families with the ease of Airtable’s available-on-any-device technology. It leverages calendar views, search block, summary block, and fun emoji to make it easy to see what needs to be done. Perfect for students who can now get Airtable Pro free for two years. This planner is simple enough that a middle school student has used it independently, yet it is powerful enough for high school and beyond. For elementary students, parents should plan to set up the assignments, but even young students can check off their own assignments. For pre-readers and emerging readers, just use emoji for

The Hidden Side of Script Block Development Script builders are forever optimists. When they hear statements like this, it’s like a red cape to an angry bull. It would be nice if the app did this simple task. We hear these words and our synapses begin to spark. Soon after the request sinks in we fly into action with every belief that indeed, it’s going to be as simple as the user described and it will undoubtedly and magically emerge from our fingers before we can type - this is a complete and utter distraction that I should have ignored. Every human on this planet is able to sing pitch-perfect just like Brittany Spears - in their mind. Likewise, developers have no trouble envisioning and writing an entire BUG-FREE program cerebrally and seemingly in seconds. Your butt hasn’t even touched the chair and you’re already writing the first lines of code, anxious and eager to see your foregone [requirements] co

Just wanted to say a huge thank you to the airtable team. As an educator, looking ahead to school closure, you have saved the day! My students in 2nd grade are already able to use it by themselves. Now, I can just send home the links and my students can go ahead with their studies and have the comfort that with so many things different they know how to use it! Thank you!!!

Hi Airtable! I made this using using Google Docs template, Airtable and Integromat. I thought I would share this as a bit of a “lift”, considering what’s going on in the world. Mary Kay

We’re starting to highlight individuals and communities who are helping one another. Today, we wanted to share a recent example shared by Chris Dancy who created an Airtable template for neighborhoods to use in conjunction with Nextdoor to mobilize his neighborhood of 800 people. This base was developed by @chrisdancy to help local neighborhoods connect volunteers with skills, resources, and facilities to support people in and around their neighborhood. You can view and copy the template (and related quick-start videos) here on Airtable Universe. We hope you can leverage something like this within y

Why these scripts In the scripting block, in order to get cell values from the records returned by the selectRecordsAsync() method, a script must use the getCellValue() method. These two helper functions are designed to make future access to cell values more accessible to other parts of a script by turning cell values into object properties. Record values as object properties Example usage: let records = await getRecordsAsList(table, fieldNames); recordId = records[index].id; recordName = records[index].name; fieldValue = records[index].fields[fieldName]; Here’s the code: gist.github.com

Hi everyone :wave: We’re excited to release a new tool for Airtable: Search Webpage for Airtable Records! This tool is particularly useful if you have clients/students/employees and you only want them to be able to see the records that they are associated with, and none of the other records in your base. Example Use Cases Order status lookup Ticket tracking Search student’s grades And much more! Some of the Features: Generates a unique URL that you can share with anyone. Supports searching with one or multiple fields. Hide any fields you do not want to show in the results.

I love sharing tips to help others learn more about Airtable, and the idea for this YouTube channel has been brewing in my mind for a while now. Even though I’m scrambling to prepare for our cross-country move in a few weeks, I wanted to make this quick tease about the channel: Subscribe now so that you’ll be ready when the “real” stuff starts going up, which will probably be some time in December if things go according to plan.

This is not a show; rather mostly a tell. It’s my experience (which is extremely limited given that the Script Block feature is still a newborn) that for every hour spent developing a block, plan on an equal or greater time implementing the completed block into your solution. There are many reasons this is the case including but not limited to these points: Hard-coded table and/or field references Success-biased data that create testing blind-spots Lack of anticipation concerning the block used in “the wild” Inadequate testing cycles at scale I’m often asked - Hey Bill, can you whip me up a script to do that? My problem is so simple, I’ll bet it will take you a few minutes to bang this out! Um, sure? I guess? On second thought … many of us who may be easily coaxed into the feeling that script blocks are simple littl

Hi all, just thought I’d share an insight I had about working with lists. Recently, I had a project where we needed to take an email address from a customer-submitted form and check whether the email is from a list of known domains. I could have used an OR() statement, but that would have created a very lengthy formula, because I had to first separate out the domain from the rest of the email, using this formula: LOWER(MID(TRIM({Email}),FIND("@",TRIM({Email}))+1,999)) Thus, if I have to compare that to 5 different domains using an OR() statement, I’d have to repeat that formula snippet 5 times, and that’s not very DRY, is it? What I realized was that instead, I could use a SWITCH() statement. Since a SWITCH() statement allows you to optionally include a final parameter in case none of the cases listed matches the initi

Many future clients often ask me: Should I automate this process? And if so, where do I start? This is not uncommon thinking; we’re over-saturated with tasks and our resources are stretched beyond reason. Of course, the answer is always - yes - automated it all if possible. And while we like the sound of this, the more difficult question to answer is the cost-benefit of automation. Until you can look at a task (or ideally, a collection of dependent tasks) and put a value of making it entirely disappear from your involvement, automation should not be undertaken. My advice is to segment processes with a diagram and then apply some basic metrics concerning effort. Once you see the bigger picture and the effort each step in your processes require, then you can ask if it makes sense to automate that segment of your process. Some processes (when diagrammed) become obvious candidates for automation, but

This is an example to take advantage of Airtable’s new scripting block for taking a selection of records and formatting links to send in an email to a fellow collaborator. The sample base is located on Universe: Airtable