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Improvements to expand and edit records

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Jordan_Scott1
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

Hi all!

We are excited to share that as of today, we’ve made it easier for you - and your team - to expand and edit records in Airtable.

  • We’re making it easier to edit records while in the expanded view. We’ve increased the area around fields (including moving the field label to the left to save vertical space) in the expanded view for each record and made improvements to the activity pane.
  • We’ve also made it clear when a field is editable in expanded view so your collaborators can easily make edits.
  • We’ve added a persistent action bar so that common actions like changing between records, turning on comments, and the record title all stay in the same place, even as you scroll through the details.

You can expect these updates to be reflected in your bases in the next two days. We’d love to hear feedback from you about this change, so please leave your feedback below!

115 Comments
ScottWorld
18 - Pluto
18 - Pluto

Serious question: Can we please just revert it back to how it used to be?

What I find interesting is that nobody ever complained about the old view, but Airtable insisted on changing it.

Meanwhile, people have been complaining about hundreds of other things regularly, yet Airtable steadfastly refuses to change actual pain points for people.

The logic at this company completely baffles me.

Another recent change they made a few months ago which is terrible:

I hate that when you hover over the view name in the toolbar, a completely useless & irrelevant tooltip pops up which completely blocks the list of views, which is precisely what you were trying to see by hovering over the view name in the toolbar. :man_shrugging: :man_facepalming:

I often find myself wondering: Do Airtable employees actually use Airtable?

Bill_French
17 - Neptune
17 - Neptune

Ideally, this would be wonderful, but two things seem to suggest they’re on the wrong track:

  1. This thread.
  2. The data suggests they already had hit 90% happiness threshold with the classic version.

Oh, good. I must have missed that; seems logical but this has to be an idea that Airtable acts upon.

Yes - that’s reasonable. But the data suggests there were few pain points; today there are many more.

I still have this feeling that the remedy [today] is to support both the old and new and allow the new to be the conduit for data gathering and feedback. That would at least get them back to 90%+ satisfaction.

Bill_French
17 - Neptune
17 - Neptune

Actually, there are some users who have indicated their complaints with the old interface were included in the new vastly hated version. So there were reasons for Airtable to entertain changes.

Kamille_Parks
16 - Uranus
16 - Uranus

I agree. The old design had many faults (from my perspective) including but not limited to the following:

  1. The inefficient use of space for “narrow” fields (like dates)
  2. It follows the field visibility/sort order of the first view in the table, with no way to customize this behavior for different scenarios
  3. Linked record fields take up a massive amount of space if there are 5+ links (I mentioned this above)

all of the above were carried through to the new design.

Rebecca_Elam
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

yes! it seems if we can view the pill shape from the grid view in interfaces we should be able to view there as well.
On the inverse, attachments are too small for me (using documents) to see any of the words on the page in ALL the views

David_Solimini
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

I proposed exactly that in my feedback in the form. The choice to make the expanded view a modal over the whole interface doesn’t gain the user anything – though I understand why it was the straightforward choice originally. An alternative is to use the existing interface structure and have it it expand into the grid/view area, permitting lots of potential UI innovation.

Margaret_Picker
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Glad to see you are listening,

The main issue that is emerging ever more clearly for us is that this new interface is discriminating against our collaborators who suffer from Dyslexia. We have three of these.

Everyone is finding it hard to find the fields they want to look at. Our dyslexia sufferers are really struggling and may not be able to continue to use Airtable. The loss of boxes and colour clues round fields has left them feeling they are swimming in a sea of text.

Please restore this aspect, i.e. colour/shading to show background v fields, and a line round the fields. A grey line that turns blue when clicked in was ideal.

David_Solimini
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

For what it’s worth, the full linked record view is very useful for our team. I think it makes sense for the pill to exist in the grid – It’s logical for the expanded view to be… expanded… and show more!

Karlstens
11 - Venus
11 - Venus

Colour is king. Now would be the perfect time to introduce Field colours/shading to both bases, interfaces and the Expand and Edit Record pop-up.

Rebecca_Elam
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

my point is we should be able to have a formatting tab on all fields that houses the ability to choose how we view things like attachment sizes and pill linked records and such