Automate email digests with 3 new features 🚀

[Jason]

Hey community!

Today we are officially launching several brand new automation features to help you build more robust workflows.

• Automation trigger: at a scheduled time
• Automation action: find records
• Rendering records as a list

One of the best applications for these new features is making an email digest, where you can schedule a time to send a list of records that match the conditions you set. To see how all of these features come together to build an email digest, see this support article.

Below you’ll find a shorter summary of each new feature.

At a scheduled time trigger

The “At a scheduled time” trigger allows you to trigger (or run) an automation at a pre-designated date and time. You can choose to run at regular intervals (in hours or minutes) or at set time on specific days of the week.

Find records action

This action will look for records matching conditions that you can specify within the action settings. If a record that matches the conditions is found, you can add a following action that uses the record data to perform some other action.

Render records as a list

This new feature lets you use the records found in the “find records” trigger and render them as a list within an email. You can select which fields to include, and render them as a list of records in the email.

Share your feedback

Our developers would love to hear your feedback around this feature, so feel free to comment in this topic with any questions or ideas on how we can improve.

[Databaser]

Jordan_Gauger:

2nd Bump here, really need to mark records as ‘Sent in Digest’ but can’t Find Records and Update them, I get an error with multiple record IDs.

Databaser:

Also: being able to “find records” + update them would be a huge step forwards.

Also waiting for this one!

[Karlstens]

The “Render as HTML grid” is awesome! I’m not too sure however, if I’ve missed a step - because my emailed grid has the columns out of order. In all the views, taking your example, I have Channel - Status - Name, but when it renders to the grid my resulting email has the columns in a different order and I have no idea what controls this… I’m reading up further support articles, but would appreciate any pointers if anyone has time to comment.

EDIT: Ahh, here we go;

Is there a way to order the HTML grid or list?

Currently, the order that the list of records appears in is from created first to created last. At this time, there are not any ways to reorder the way the list is rendered.

Ahhh, that’s tough. Can we please have the HTML grid order as per the View that it’s pulling the data from? There’s no way that I can easily delete and recreate the columns just for the sake of the output order - Would be good if we can get a fix for this asap.

[Jessica_Pena]

Excited about the digest, but also having issues – two big ones for my use.

Issue #1) It is frustrating that even when the records are sorted by date, they show up out of order in the grid

Issue #2) The time zone is set from my google calendar sync and shows up correctly in my base, and then converts to UTC in the digest.

Start	End
7/3/2021 11:00pm UTC	7/4/2021 2:00am UTC
6/19/2021 11:00pm UTC	6/20/2021 2:00am UTC
6/26/2021 11:00pm UTC	6/27/2021 2:00am UTC
7/2/2021 11:00pm UTC	7/3/2021 2:00am UTC

[Chantal_Encalad]

Hi! I keep trying to set up a daily digest including the start time of an event. However, it keeps changing and sending the time of the event as UTC. I have NOT opted to “Use the same time zone (GMT) for all collaborators” when I created the “Date” field on my base.

What can I do?

[Justin_Barrett]

@Jessica_Pena @Chantal_Encalada The UTC issue that you both mention definitely feels like something that could be improved in Airtable. While Airtable staffers might see your comments here, I suggest writing to Airtable support directly with your feedback.

In the meantime, you could create formula fields to force-format your date fields based on your local timezone, and include those formula fields in your digests instead of the actual date fields. (Internally, all dates are stored relative to UTC/GMT. The switch in the date field options only controls how dates are displayed to the user, not how the data is stored.)

@Jessica_Pena The Find records action was recently updated to support collection of records from a specific view in a table. My gut says that this option should retain the record order within that view—including sorting—whereas the condition option will likely use a different order. I haven’t tested this theory, but I wanted to throw the idea out there in case you haven’t tried it yet.

[kuovonne]

At the time of this post, the find records action based on a view does not retain the view sort order.

[Jessica_Pena]

Thanks @Justin_Barrett, I’ll file away the info re: force format for date fields. Unfortunately until the records can show up in the order they are presented within the view, it renders the digest kind of useless for our business :frowning:

[Tristan-ARG]

Hi,

I have a table with around 150 proyects, this proyects belong to different managers (in total 5). Is there anyway of sending a digest to each manager only with the proyects that they are in charge of?. The only workaround I see is to make one automation for each manager, but as automation are limited I wouldnt like to spend so many in just doing the same task.

[Databaser]

You can combine multiple “find” action steps with “email” steps.

Find 1 = manager 1 > email 1
Find 2 = manager 2 > email 2
…

[Jason]

Hi everyone, just a quick heads up that we just released a few updates to the"at a scheduled time" trigger.