Show and Tell

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

Sometimes you want to visualize some metrics. For example, I may want to see the different delivery metrics of email campaigns by different segments across many years. I can do this nicely with blocks if each campaign is delivered to only one segment. However, if I’ve got an email that hits two (or more birds) with one stone…aka one email delivered to multiple segments, this is where my chart gets wonky. I can’t break out the multiple segments while still looking at my chart over time. (Note: You can do this in a pivot table block, but charts are just way more impactful sometimes.) To get a better chart that does break these segments out, I’ll need a Summary Table, which is a nice way of saying I’ll need a junction table to break out this

Using this script with the Content Calendar Template, you will be able to do some common tasks with managing your content calendar. This script will enhance the Content Calendar Base by providing 2 common tasks: Create new Content - this easier approach to creating new content makes it quick to get content added to your table Publish Content - once you have created content, you want to publish it quickly to multiple platforms. This makes it easy to track which platforms you are publishing it to (Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook) and automatically links it back to the primary content. NOTE: This does not actually publish to Social media platforms, it simply tracks where you have published the content to and how. No changes are required to be made, simply run script and select one of the two options. TEMPLATE TO INSTALL:

Something very often requested is the ability to extract the meta information of a base/table to be used for external use. Now, with the new scripting block, that information can be extracted and shared outside. Simply copy this code into a scripting block and run it. If you wish to publish to a 3rd party endpoint, simply modify the codebase. Full documentation provided inside the code. gist.github.com https://gist.github.com/on2air/ab32b4bb59d02d490be37e28d45daf92 On2Air: Meta Extraction Script /***** * Title: Post Meta Data * License: MIT * Author: Openside (Team behind On2Air

Hi Everyone. Beenform is a simple form backend product that enables you to setup working web forms that works with Airtable in just a couple minutes. With Beenform, you can hook up your static HTML form, with an endpoint that captures form submissions and creates an Airtable record. In addition to collecting submissions, you can enable User Authentication in beenform so that any form submission from your users, an automated email with their unique individual link will be sent to them, which they can always use to update only their individual records. All these changes are made in your Airtable base. Every Beenform form also includes automatic spam filtering, Google recaptcha support etc. We are still currently in beta, so it’s completely free. Let me know what you think. You can check it out here https://beenform.co . Thanks all :slight

Hello everyone. We use Airtable for various things at Unly, and we have always been concerned by the inability to create scheduled backups that really fit our needs. Despite the fact Airtable has its own backups/restore feature, it didn’t fit our needs. And, because Airtable holds lots of business-sensitive data, it was a very big risk for us not to be in control of the backup&restore process. So, we built a tool that is designed to perform scheduled backups automatically, and deal with backups lifecycle (auto-removal, etc.). Today, we’re releasing this proprietary software as OSS under MIT license. GitHub

I always wince when I see broad and sweeping claims that a tool can perform workflows. This is especially problematic in platforms that are not designed with an integrated state machine. Lacking this, we are all left to manage the state of any workflow process on our own. Many of you are nodding. Here’s a design I put together recently that provides a way for vendors to receive email notifications of opportunities to bid on projects and a complete workflow process that captures their bids. The red lines indicate the flow of the Quote Request Process which is a lights-out factory process - it just happens automatically as new records emerge in the Quote Request table. The green lines indicate the flow of the Request Response Process which is kicked off by a vendor respond

Hi! Would like to ask about the which options do you have for international customers (Non-US residents) because I’d like to subscribe but there’s no option for Paypal for instance. Thanks.

Airtable Now Supports Webhooks! This has been an open item in the Airtable support community for a few years, see “Webhooks for Records” and here, & here, and we are excited to offer a free solution to the community. Here is the high level solution: Based on the transitive property (A=B and B=C, then A=C), Airtable supports Slack Notifications, and Slack supports webhooks, so Airtable supports webhooks! You just have to know how to set it up correctly. With a simple integration via Pipedream into Slack, all Airtable users can now get near real time

Are you an avid reader?! I just posted a Book Tracker Database on Airtable Universe! Airtable

tl;dr version: A frequent query and/or complaint concerns users who wish to access data from a record for use in a calculation performed in a different record from the same table. Often this takes the form of a user asking ‘how to retrieve a value based on row number’; other times the user wishes to perform a calculation that assumes knowledge of the previous record — for instance, maintaining a running balance. A recently published base contains four approaches to this problem, three involving sequential records offset by varying numbers of days, and a fourth allowing retrieval of arbitrary data from the previous and previous-but-one record. Lately, I’ve been playing around with cross-record or multi-record calculations — that is, the ability to retrieve a value from a prior record for use with calculations in the current record. This is a recurring issue for users who conflate Airta