Announcing the Airtable Platform

[Jason]

Hello Airtable Community! :wave:

We have a lot of exciting news to share today as part of our launch of the Airtable Platform. I’ll share some high-level details here in this post and also direct you to our other announcement resources that include more specific information. Most importantly, I’d recommend reading the official announcement from our CEO, Howie Liu where he covers each of our major new platform features:

• Apps (renamed from blocks) and the Airtable Marketplace
• Automations
• Airtable Sync
  
  

A new apps marketplace for creators like you

Previously, you’ve used Blocks to customize Airtable with pre-built functionality like maps and Gantt charts. Now, with the launch of Airtable Apps, we’re renaming Blocks and expanding the platform’s capabilities by enabling creators to build their own apps fully integrated with Airtable.

We’ve also just launched a new Airtable Marketplace where you can browse and install apps created by Airtable, our partners, and creators like you. Today, you can access more than 50 available apps! And along with this, we’re excited to announce an official pathway for any developers to submit their custom app to the marketplace.

We believe that a strong developer ecosystem can solve broader, deeper problems and help teams tailor the entire Airtable experience to their specific operational and business needs. To demonstrate this, I want to highlight five apps that have been built by fellow community members:

• Scheduler App by @Kamille_Parks
• Image Markup App by @Amr
• Marked Preview App by @Leo_Lutz
• Eazyfields App by @Ronen_Babayoff
• Link Records by Fields App

Lastly, here’s a short video about creating your own blocks.

Ready to explore? Visit the Airtable Marketplace at airtable.com/marketplace →

Create powerful workflows with automations

Automations allow you to configure custom trigger-action workflows directly within your Airtable base. This will help your team go faster by creating custom notifications, automating redundant work, and integrating seamlessly with your favorites tools.

Many of you have already been testing Automations, and we’re pleased to share that it’s now officially available to all Airtable users.

Learn more about how to set up an Automation here →

Share information across your network with Airtable Sync

The ability to share information between bases has been a top feature request from Airtable customers. Now, you can set up a table to be automatically synced from one base to another. This also means you can now link records between bases! :tada:

This brand new feature will open up countless possibilities, allowing you to create a single source of truth across multiple teams, workflows, and bases.

So, how does Airtable Sync work?

• A view share link allows data to be synced by other teams. With the link, other teams can instantly sync data without needing to deal with exporting and importing data.

• A view from one base can be used as a synced table in another base

• You can manually or automatically update synced tables

• A synced table is read-only and can be used without impacting the original data source

Browse our support articles that cover more in-depth functionality →

Have questions?

If you have a question or feedback about this launch, my colleague @Taylor_Savage and I will be responding in this topic throughout the day today. You may also want to check out a related update for developers: Custom Blocks update: Apps, SDK v1.0.0, and more.

We’re looking forward to seeing everything this community will build with these new features!

[Jason]

@RnJ No, it’s something we’re testing internally. I adjusted the screenshot to reflect the available options in Share view.

[RnJ]

Darn :grinning: If you need any testers let me know :raised_hand:

[chrisdancy]

I didn’t promote the event on the community, because I am trying to gather the people who are afraid of the community and who need inspiration!
We have about 600 people signed up now!

Excited to get folks talking about building

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

And an annual Airtable conference!

The pace with which Airtable changes is unsuitable for an annual conference. By the time a content committee approves of the presentations and session, many will be obsolete.

[ScottWorld]

Bill.French:

The pace with which Airtable changes is unsuitable for an annual conference. By the time a content committee approves of the presentations and session, many will be obsolete

Please. Bill, you have the uncanny ability to find a problem in any solution! :winking_face:

What you said is true, but this a problem with ALL tech conferences, and they all still happen.

Usually, this is resolved in one of two ways:

(1) The presenter is given advance knowledge of the product changes & an early release of the new product, so their presentations are timely & relevant to the new release.
or
(2) The presenter says, “And you can do this even easier now, as of this morning’s release!”

There are NUMEROUS benefits to be had from conferences — not the least of which is networking & socializing with Airtable users, developers, vendors, and the Airtable team themselves.

Community & communication is key, and that’s what a conference provides.

[ScottWorld]

In fact, one of the best things about conferences is that’s where companies often INTRODUCE their new features & new products & new services!!

It’s a way to gather all the fans together and get them all excited about the new things that they don’t know about yet!!

That’s the WHOLE POINT!

[Jason]

One more update for today: we just made an additional three automation triggers available for all customers:

• When event created trigger for Google Calendar
• When response arrives for Google Forms
• When row created for Google Sheets

You can view the related support article for all automation triggers here.

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

you have the uncanny ability to find a problem in any solution!

That’s exactly my point - yearly is not a solution. I think more frequent conferences would be well-received because the typical user is likely to be moving up in Airtable maturity on a monthly basis.

ScottWorld:

There are NUMEROUS benefits to be had from conferences

Indeed. I support your idea; just not annually. Most conference cycles - even for big platforms like Elastic{ON} and NVIDIA’s GTX have changed to more rapid iterations because their technology is changing so fast and their users are adopting it at a far greater pace. I think Airtable should think this way with respect to any kind of conferences because they have obviously reached a stride that warrants the spread of information at a pace that matches their leaps forward with the ability of its community to do the same.

It’s a good problem to have but it does require more and better communications pathways and online conferences (for now) seems to be the right thing to do. I don’t know what the right velocity should be, but my thinking is one a year will not have the positive and sustained impact that two or three per year might have. I believe GTX is every 9 months which I believe [presently] coincides with their major release cycles.

[Bill_French]

Jason:

When row created for Google Sheets …

And there it is. :slightly_smiling_face: I predicted the slow and eventual obsolescence of the glu-factories. It doesn’t eliminate every Zapier use case, but these event-based integrations will begin to put a dent in the externalization of innovative integrations.

Automatic document creation and sharing from Airtable records

A significant and growing slice of my integration and data architecture consulting projects come from clients who have hit the limits of Goldbergian-sh*tshows and they’ve had it with reliability issues and the added cost associated with third-party solutions.

[Justin_Barrett]

While most of the videos on my channel’s production plan are backlogged, I couldn’t resist doing a quick demo of the new table sync feature once it became available for my account.