Show and Tell

Part 1 of a series I’m doing about how to use Airtable API to create a user database. Chinara James – 27 May 19 Creating a user database with Airtable part 1 | Chinara James A user database with encrypted passwords using Express, bcrypt and Airtable Part 2 of the tutorial series is live. Learn to persist the user from page to page by implementing a session. Chinara James – 31 May 19 Creating a user database with Airtable part 2 | Chinara James A user database with encrypted passwords using Airtable and Express with simple sessions Part 3 is live. Add a password reset flow. Chinara James – 11 Jun 19 Create a user database with Airtable part 3 | Chinara James In part 3 of this tutorial series we add a password reset flow to our user database created with Airtable and ExpressJs.

I’ve just published a blog post about creating and sending emails to Contacts in your Base with a facility to add in Standard Paragraphs. The example uses Integromat to replace placeholders in the text with standard paragraphs, send the result by email and then update the database with the date/time sent and the resulting text. Here’s a link: https://www.onlinedatabase.expert/post/send-emails-with-standard-paragraphs-from-airtable-or-knack-via-integromat Feel free to join the site if you’d like to comment, ask questions in the forum or be notified when additional content is published.

Hey everyone! We’ve started hosting monthly contests via the newsletter and this month we’re in the mood to travel, so we want to see Universe bases celebrating places. :earth_asia: These can be about the place you’re from, your favorite places you’ve visited, or just places you want to visit. A list of your favorite restaurants in your hometown, a compendium of the best camping trips in your country, a selection of deep-sea submarine tours around the world—send them all our way! Add blocks to your base (like map or chart) for extra credit. :white_check_mark: We’ll give our favorite Airtable Universe bases a shoutout in the next newsletter and send a few lucky folks Airtable swag. Feel free to submit more than one Universe base if you feel so inclined. We’ll take submissions until June 1, 2019! :sparkles: Submission Form: https://airtable.com/shr9wVP5hjPQiPj8E

I have come across a way to eliminate the blank preview and broken download of uploaded PDF documents. Before uploading the PDF to Airtable I’ll open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro and save the PDF as a PDF/A. I also select the “Settings” option in the “Save As” window and turn on the Apply Corrections option. I have a attached a screen shot of the “Settings” options. I hope this helps someone. If this is already known knowledge, please feel free to delete this post.

Today, Integromat have announced their updated integration with Airtable! I have been recommending Integromat to Airtable users for Automation and Integration for some time and this updated release removes the biggest issue with using the two together - the timeouts experienced when designing processes. I’ve written an introductory blog post about the new version (and have several other posts about Integromat on my site as well) - and I think this is potentially a game changer for Airtable: Database Resources New Airtable / Integromat Integration | Learn more about Cloud Databases Ideas and reviews of Cloud Database platforms My conclusion - I think Integromat can really be seen as the ‘language’ to use to automate your Airtable workflows.

We 're a nonprofit, and we keep a database of foundations to which we plan to apply for grants. Some of them have no deadlines, while others have 1, 2, 3, or 4 deadlines per year. We record each deadline in a separate column/field (we’re using the free version, so we can’t access the multiple dates feature), with field titles {Deadline 1}, {Deadline 2}, etc. We now have a new field that outputs the next deadline in reader-friendly format, if there is one, based on a thorough nesting of IF() statements. Here, the statement names “IF2”, “IF3”, etc. are for keeping track of things while assembling, but the final assembly at the end just includes the conditional statements. IF1: If Deadline 1 is blank, blank, else IF2 IF({Deadline 1}=BLANK(), BLANK(), IF2) IF2: If Deadline 1 is after today, Deadline 1, else IF3 IF(IS_AFTER({Deadline 1}, TODAY()), DATETIME_FORMAT({Deadline 1}, 'll'), IF3) IF3: If Deadline 2 is blank, IF9, else IF4 IF({Deadline 2}=BLANK(), IF9, IF4) IF4: If Deadline 2 is aft

I created a COMPLETELY FREE Zapier integration for AirTable that will give you advanced automation features beyond what AirTable’s integration provides you, and you can get it here. I’ll be sharing a Medium blog post down the road on how to do all of this yourself, too. In the meantime, here is a list below of what I have done today, and what is coming soon: Name Zapier Type Description Released New Record Trigger Triggers when a new record is available in your specified base and table. Yes New Record in View Trigger Triggers when a new record is available in your specified base, table, and view.  Yes  Create Record Action Create a new record in your specified base and table. In Progress Update Record Action Update values for a record in your specified base and table.  In Progress  Find Record Action/Search Use Airtable’s formula syntax to find matching AirTable records. Not Yet Started Update Record Trigger Triggered when a record that you specify is updated. Not Yet

I am a process guy, a large percentage of my work experience has been in manufacturing environments where I grew to love to power of Lean tools. Kanban isn’t the only resource that can be utilized in the Information Technology sector, Standard Work and Kaizen are equally as adaptable! The basic premise is this, your team needs to execute the most effective and efficient process possible. That means being able to quickly adapt your standard processes when a member(s) of your team find a way to improve a process. This is one of the ways that you can incorporate continuous improvement (Kaizen) across a team or organization. On the back end of Kaizen is the ugly business of updating your process documentation. Currently that means manually updating/reformatting an HTML table every time my team makes a change and then manually updating a flow chart diagram to match the change. This is time I should be spending training my team on the new process, not manually formatting a document. Thanks t

After the success of our On2Air: Actions launch, we built a tool to give some juicy functionality to forms for Airtable. These are the forms you’ve (probably) been looking for. :robot: POLL: Which feature(s) for forms would be most useful for you with Airtable? (If I missed something, let me know in comments) Edit already existing records Instant updates to base data from form submission Conditional Logic (View/Hide Fields, Multi-Page, etc) Prefill Field Values Ability to search within your database from form fields More customization options (HTML or other) 0 voters You got me. The nifty tool we made does all of the above +some. Note: This requires an active Airtable and Jotforms account to work Disclaimer: We are not associated with Airtable or Jotform. Using this tool requires entering your API key into the On2Air: Forms widget within Jotform. . What does it do? We built this tool (called On2Air: Forms) to answer the myriad of requests we’ve heard both from our own cli

I needed to update Airtable with info pulled from a custom CMS that doesn’t have the export feature I needed, so I wrote a quick Javascript bookmarklet that scrapes the values from the page, looks up the corresponding record and updates it. Not the most robust script, but it’s saving me lots of time! Now all I have to do is browse to the page of each contact that I’m looking for and click on this bookmark. Could easily be adapted to use Airtable as a bookmark manager, or a way to save snippets and images. javascript:(function(){ fields = {}; fields["Email Address"] = jQuery("#email").val().toLowerCase(); fields["Address"] = jQuery("#addressstreet1").val(); fields["Address 2"] = jQuery("#addressstreet2").val(); fields["City"] = jQuery("#addresscity").val(); fields["State"] = jQuery("#addressstate").val(); fields["Zip"] = jQuery("#addresspostalcode").val(); fields["Country"] = jQuery("#addresscountry").val(); if (jQuery("#gender_female").is(':checked')){ fields["Gender"] =

I’m happy to announce the launch of Quickflow, a tool designed to save time on manual tasks by integrating web apps together! Airtable is one of the connected apps that Quickflow integrates with others such as Google Drive, Slack, and Dropbox (with new apps being added every day). You can give Quickflow a test run at https://www.getquickflow.com, it’s completely free to try. If there are any particular integrations you’d like to see, please let me know at ricky@getquickflow.com. Thanks!

A couple of hours ago, while I was working on this base and post, I decided to take a break and go for a walk on the beach. I got as far as the shipwreck of the William H Sumner, exposed by Hurricane Florence, before heading back. Once I got here, I sat down to finish this post and discovered @Justin_Barrett had beaten me to it. Justin’s solution is preferable to mine, as it is more general-purpose, but I’ve decided to post anyway, as drop-in code for anyone with a specific need to restart numbering each day. For those of you who can stomach having to link every record of a table to a single record in a second table, this post and linked base demonstrate how to create a numbering system that resets every day. In the demo, I create a composite number displaying ‘Day#.Sequence#’ — ‘1.1’, ‘1.2’, ‘1.3’, ‘2.1’, and so on — but the formula can easily be modified for other uses. First, the caveats — because there are always caveats: The sequence is based on a date derived fro

I recently moved my work history notes into Airtable, and wanted a way to see at a glance how long I worked at each company, including time spans for those companies I’m still working with (I used to work full-time, but starting in 2012 my work became a mix of part-time and freelance/contract jobs). The end product is a clean listing of years and months1, as this sample illustrates: The full table includes three hidden formula fields: {End Date} defaults to TODAY() if no specific date is entered in the {To} field; otherwise it uses the {To} date. {Years} and {Months} run calculations based on {End Date}. The {Length} field puts it all together. It’s not a particularly complex setup, but it has more potential use than just job tracking, so I thought I’d share in case anyone else could use it. Copy it to your own workspace to seen the formulas. Airtable Time Span Sample - Airtable Brief example of how to measure time spans in years and months, including situations wh

4 Teir Gantt, Single Dependency I really want to mate the Gnatt (beta) block work. I’ve spent some time trying to work around the circular references, and in-ability to look past a the first record link. I got the start date for a task to adjust up to the 4th task in a dependency chain, hooray. The timeline block reflects the correct start date, unfortunately, the Gantt block sets any task that is dependent on a dependent task to the 1st of the year. I’m hope new column field types or other Gnatt friendly updates are made in the near future.

This is a card based calendar, powered by an Airtable. It includes helpful details such as countdowns, Google Calendar links, auto-magical sorting. See the GitHub repo and demo at https://github.com/Arty2/aircalendar This script and its related Airtable base may change breaking compatibility. Designed with multilingual websites (i18n) in mind. Underlying code is quickly hacked together, but fully functional and should work even with missing fields. PS. Dear forum admins: “can’t put images in a post” is not that useful when not knowing what one has to do before using images. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I was looking for a meeting collaboration tool for a “pains, gains and goals” brainstorming exercise. I looked at a number of tools and all of them were quite a bit more complex than I wanted. Luckily for me, I have a subscription to Table2Site and @poehah was available to answer my questions on Saturday! Feel free to check out both the site (this is a demo page, so feel free to enter results): https://table2site.com/site/brainstorming Here is the related base: Airtable Brainstorming Tool - Airtable Explore the "Brainstorming Tool" base on Airtable. A couple of tricks that I discovered: To embed an Airtable form using the iframe option in Table2Site, you will need the embed URL, not the URL of the form. Example: https://airtable.com/embed/shrq6brDpXNi2RDKF not https://airtable.com/shrq6brDpXNi2RDKF. While the “Lookup” and “Formula” field types break when using the Table2Site data format, you can change the type of field to “Rollup” a

Hey guys, I’m using Airtable as a kind of database for a ReactJs project. I’m pretty new to React and javascript in general and so this might be trivial for a seasoned developer. But I wanted to share one approach you can take to integrating Airtable into your React App. Here’s the tutorial: http://www.automationfuel.com/airtable-reactjs/ And here’s the github repo: https://github.com/focuswish/airtable-react I hope someone finds it useful :slightly_smiling_face:

Having had quite a few questions about an earlier blog post I wrote about creating checklists in Airtable using Zapier, I decided to write a new version using Integromat instead (which makes it much simpler, requiring no code): Database Resources Creating Checklists with Airtable and Integromat | Learn more about Cloud... Ideas and reviews of Cloud Database platforms I hope people find this useful!!

Wanted to share a great experience I’m having with ReportBin. Use case: we work with athletes and provide them with career coaching to help them figure out what their post-competition life will look like. within a broader curriculum, we have individual homework assignments which are collected either through Airtable forms (when simple) or one-off custom forms built from scratch. after the athlete completes an assignment, it then needs to be reviewed by their career coach and the athlete which is where ReportBin has been a total life saver. after setting up the template for each assignment, we were able to use zapier to build a workflow where as soon as an athlete submits something, we generate a ReportBin report and the link gets written back into our Airtable. the report looks like this. i started working with Sam at ReportBin a few months ago and the pace of their development has been awesome. as a non-developer, this was a great solution for me and was way easier than trying to f

Hey all, excited to tell you about BuiltOnAir, a project that’s been in the making for a little while now, and now going live. I think it’s awesome, but would love to hear your thoughts also :thinking: What is it? BuiltOnAir is a hub for Airtable happenings. We made it to become a place to bring together, highlight, and empower the people building things with Airtable - so if you’re here reading this, this is for you. BuiltOnAir is (currently) comprised of these main elements: A podcast: A weekly production highlighting an expert, professional, or enthusiast using Airtable in their work. We hear their story with Airtable, then we get a peek into their work with a “show and tell” of a base they’ve created (usually with a whole slew of nifty hacks and tips). Super inspirational, both from a technical Airtable usage standpoint and from hearing about the causes people are working on. Weekly community recaps: A hand-curated list of the most relevant and recent updates from multiple Airt

Hey all, I’m really excited to share something that has been a long time in the making and one I think will help a lot of people. I’m curious: how many of you use Zapier for your Airtable integrations? I wanted to get a general poll for a sense of how people are using automation with Airtable: POLL: Do you use Zapier for your Airtable integrations? I have no need for Zapier Nope, I use another platform No, but I might in the near future Yes, and it does absolutely everything I want it to Yes, but I need it to do more (it lacks key functionality) 0 voters Excited to tell you about a project I’ve been working on and finally ready to launch! I’d welcome your feedback and insights on this. It truly is a game changer for what you can do with Airtable and opens the door for endless possibilities. Disclaimer: We are not associated with Airtable or Zapier (although we are an Expert Partner of Zapier). Using this product requires entering your API key into Zapier and our connector w

At BaseGenius we’ve now helped a few clients keep data in sync between Airtable and Salesforce. So we decided to productize our code and are launching it as a separate product from our regular consulting work. Check it out here and send us a note if you’d like to use it for your business. Daniel from BaseGenius

I’ve used Airtable to run a couple RPG games and it’s really great. Being able to have a view for my players to look at where I can post images of NPCs or notes is terrific. Here’s how I created the base (this is a Forbidden lands game). And here’s what players can see. It’s challenging to create hidden views that actually show the information I want to share. Hopefully someday there is another step for linked records that allow for a cleaner format.

Hi, Users are overwhelmed by passwords, and companies like slack have implemented passwordless login which I personally think is great. If you want to do the same for your app, check out my latest article on how the basics of rolling your own: https://chinarajames.com/passwordless-login-magic-links/ This use case came up for me because I wanted persons to update their own airtable record and it’s not practical to have over 300 persons as collaborators on a base, so built an app for them to login and edit their records. This is basics of how I did the login part. Hope someone finds it useful.

Thought it would be a great time to post another update on Destiny Search Project and our use of Airtable. For those that do not know we posted this original post when we first started using Airtable in 2016. Well, we have continued working on updating the system continually. We are now in Alpha Testing of our newest version (4.5 now!) With the addition of some of the beta features, and now including Blocks, we have really made some big changes. The biggest change is that we have now used embedded forms on our website to create a very easy to use interface for volunteers. We went with forms as when we have active searches we have many “staff” that come and go with very few permanent team members. We didn’t want to have to manage adding, removing, and training volunteers daily (sometimes hourly) so used forms to develop an easy to learn the system. In the future, we hope to learn more about using the API to create a fully integrated operations system directly through the website. If an