Use Airtable Data to Power Google Forms for Ingestion Back Into Airtable

[Andrew_Enright]

Airtable forms are deeply limited in regard to formatting; not even column-width is configurable/dynamic. Thus, my team needs to leverage a more advanced forms platform. Google is our first choice, but I don’t want to trade away the power of using Airtable data in things like drop-downs. Same would be true with Submittable, Formstack, etc.

Has anyone looked at and/or cracked this?!

Thanks in advance,

A.

[AlexWolfe]

Perhaps a Zapier integration with Airtable and the Google Sheet which a Google Form would output to? I believe Zapier has an integration to have any new row added to a Sheet then create a new record in an Airtable base, but this may be limited based on their pricing structure.

This was a barrier for a project I am working on as well. A temporary work-around is to copy data output by the Form from the Sheet to an ‘input’ view in AirTable. Then AirTable does all the automated data handling in separate views, etc. and you circumvent the need for an app integration (but requires some ‘manual’ effort). Just some ideas I’ve ran into - hope it helps.

[Win_Iden]

I’m currently doing exactly this with Zapier (free tier). Google form populates a sheet, new rows are the trigger. The key to the whole thing is the Zapier action “find or create record”. If the form submission is brand new (based on a search for the Google-assigned ID string) the fields populate to their mapped version in Airtable. If the row already exists and was updated, then the corresponding Airtable entry is updated instead of a new record being created.

As long as you don’t need instant sync via zapier (free tier fires every 15 minutes) you can do it all for free.

I do some additional stuff with the records in Airtable, additional fields that are changed for various reasons. So as a bonus, I use Airtable Importer to sync back to another google sheet, where you can use AwesomeTable to create all kinds of charts and interactive dashboards.

[Julian_Kirkness]

You may also like to try Cognito forms - these have Instant Zap triggers (so no wait). I have used this approach to get leads from Cognito, check for a match for the company - then update or create new, and finally check for the contact and again update or create new. All this from one Zap - for this you need a paid Zapier account because it uses multiple steps but you could get things going on the free tier of both Cognito and Zapier.

[shanti_rubens]

I’m doing something similar using Typeforms which has basic calculations built in and also Jump Logic. It’s a great service. Then I use Zapier to connect to Airtable.