Introducing New Airtable Visualization Enhancements and Enterprise Features

[Kelly_OShaughne]

We're thrilled to announce the release of our latest enterprise features and data visualization enhancements! These exciting additions provide new ways to add and operationalize data, allow for more control over data retention, and offer powerful visualization tools within Airtable. Let's explore what these features have in store for you!

Airtable Visualization Enhancements:

• App quick start
  Craft a workflow for your team faster than ever with app quick start. This new building method gets you to a powerful and intuitive solution for end users in minutes, tailored to the specific needs of your use case, automatically leveraging Airtable’s building best practices.

• New Dashboard Builder
  Quickly build insightful dashboards with a refreshed dashboard layout for interfaces. The new dashboard layout gets you up and running faster and has powerful new features like element drill downs and mobile support. This makes reporting to stakeholders and tracking progress on the go a breeze.

• Conditional Logic on Record Detail & Form Layouts (Business & Enterprise Scale Tiers)
  Create more personalized and advanced workflows in interfaces by showing or hiding fields and groups in forms and record detail pages based on specific conditions. For example, you can display different fields based on the status of a project, improving efficiency and user experience.

• Interface Form Validation (Team, Business, & Enterprise Scale Tiers)
  Ensure data integrity with customizable validation rules for interface forms, including email and URL validation, character limits, value ranges, and attachment restrictions. Validate user input and reduce errors in your data.

And More!

• Manually order records in interfaces
• Move tables in base to dropdown
• Manage and delete interface layouts

A Sneak Peek at What's Coming Up Next for Interfaces:

• Interface support for Android
• Interface CSV export
• Interface pivot tables
• Enhanced project management capabilities

You can find additional information about all of these updates on our What’s New page, including support articles for how to get started!

Enterprise Features:

Now let's dive in to the new features available to all of our Enterprise Scale customers:

• Sync Data from Workday or Snowflake into Airtable
  Importing accurate and up-to-date information from disparate sources is crucial for your workflows. With our new sync sources, Workday and Snowflake, you can seamlessly bring data from these critical sources of truth into Airtable. Sync employee data, financial records, and more to inject context and connectivity into your workflows. 
• For a deep dive into these new sync integrations, we invite our Enterprise customers to check out the exclusive blog post in our Enterprise Network!

• Custom Data Retention Capabilities
  Data security and compliance are top priorities for many enterprises. That's why we're introducing the capability to customize how long Airtable stores your app’s revision history and create policies around handling inactive apps. 

Remember, if you're an Enterprise Scale customer, you already have access to our new integrations and custom data retention. For those who aren’t on our Enterprise Scale plan, contact our sales team to learn more about upgrading your plan and unlocking these capabilities.

We can't wait to hear what you think and see what you build with these updates! 

The Airtable Team

[Pedro_Pais]

Great news, but is there any chance the Conditional Logic on Record Detail & Form Layouts is extended to Teams customers?

[Ruchika_Abbi1]

Great updates!
Does the filter on the group not allow Linked Records? Filter when creating a dashboard through blank layout allows it. Would love to be able to filter using Linked Records. 

In the screenshot shared, what I would have liked is a way to view the charts based on the City selected. 


In a blank layout, I can connect filters to the chart elements but then I don't have the drilldown capabilities.

Any further updates that will allow these filters? Any recommendation on how to make this work. 

[DAN_SMITH2]

Great update 👍  much better control over workflows using conditional filters 

[Felicia-J]

+1 on Pedro_Pais , under the current pricing model it would be more than double the cost to upgrade from team to business just to have access to conditional logic on visible fields. 

[Ben_Young1]

This is a solid batch of updates. Really appreciate the work on this release!

I wanted to call out two behaviors of conditional field and group visibility that really limit my ability to craft the types of Interface-driven experiences that I really want.

Interface Forms

The Interface Designer organizes fields on the canvas from a top-to-bottom, left-to-right manner. 
The successive order of the visible fields on a form is used to determine which fields can be used to build visibility conditions. Specifically, you can only create rules based on lookbehinds.

I presume that this is most likely intended for usability, as it prevents users from tangling their form visibility configurations and creating unusable forms. Unfortunately, we don't have any way of building forms with more complex visibility rules and configurations.

The workarounds to tackling even slightly more complex visibility configurations is to take one of two possible routes:

1. Create a new field (most likely a single-select or checkbox field) with the sole purpose of capturing which workflow route the form should present to them. 
   This pollutes the schema, as you now have a field that lives permanently in your table and serves no purpose other than to inform the visibility rules.
2. Accept that your users may see an unintuitive or confusing layout depending on which route they take while going through the submission flow.

Example

I recently configured a form where users are presented with two date fields. 
The user should only be allowed to fill in a single date, not both.
No matter how I build the form, Airtable will identify one field as being "before" the other. In turn, I can configure the last field's visibility to look for whether the first field is empty, but I cannot create a reciprocal rule on the first field.

The end result is that I cannot enforce required fields on both date fields, since the user should leave the first date field blank if they're taking another route. Further, depending on which path the user takes, they may end up confused about whether they should leave the first date field blank or not.

Record Detail Layouts

When configuring conditional group and field visibility in record detail layouts, you can only create conditional visibility rules for fields that are placed on the page layout. 
You cannot set rules based upon the wider properties of a given record.

I'm a strong believer that you should never show users data or information that is irrelevant to them.
It's a foundation of user-centric design. There are countless fields that I'm dying to set conditional visibility with, but they mean nothing to my stakeholders, and surfacing those fields to them is a non-starter for me.

I'm a huge proponent for Interface-only user experiences within Airtable, so these limitations are huge sores for me. If it helps with scoping and determining impact, I'd be happy to provide y'all with more in-depth use case analyses on both of these issues.

[Drew_Nemer]

@Ben_Young1  here is my work around for conditional fields.  add the fields you want to be hidden to the record viewer, the ones that will trigger in background for other fields to become visible. But set these fields that are meant to be hidden with a condition that you KNOW won't ever come about.

For instance, i had one of my hidden fields to be set to be visible only on the conditional that a client's name was "$%$%".  That way I never have to worry about hidden parts becoming visible that I want to use as conditional triggers

[Drew_Nemer]

These are honestly my dream updates.

The conditional fields has been something we have needed and desired for so long!! Thank you!.

The new dashboard is excellent, as is the field validation for emails in forms.  

I can't wait for 

• Interface CSV export
• Interface pivot tables

Some additional ideas that I wanted to put out:

-  Return floating headers to expanded record page view, this would be great for very long records.

- Conditional multi-select options dependent on other field selections in forms.   Essentially I have a multi-select or a single select field that has multi-purposes, but I only want certain options to be accessible to people submitting the forms based on other responses.  For instance, if I am making a sign-in form and one of the fields is asking whether the person coming into our office is dropping off forms or coming for an appointment, depending on what they select would trigger the following field that pertains to the the reason or contents of what they are dropping off will have a custom filtered options to select based on the previous picking.  This would make it easier for databases and tables that have a wide range of options, but too many for one form.

This is an example, i want to tailor the options available in the WHAT IS YOUR VISIT ABOUT? to the selections in the previous question on this form.   Instead of making multiple conditional fields of multi-selections because there will be cross-over and that doesn't fit our database schema. 

- Address validation options in forms and fields.  It would be great if there was the capacity to have a field that is built with the ability to look up addresses in google maps within the interface.  A lot of shopping websites have this option in their check out when you put in your address and it automatically populates based on predictive answers that are linked to google maps.  This would solve instances of customers putting in typos in their addresses when they are submitting to our base.

- Automated status updating based on multi-conditions.  This is something that is typically achieved through automation and formulas.  But it would be excellent if AirTable could build this in as a field where the contents of one field that acts as a status is conditional inputs of other fields in the table. Sort of like a roll-up field that inputs custom responses based on different conditions.   This would save a lot of time in complicated status updating protocols in complex work processes.   

- Print view with custom company logo or a header that would identify which base or record or pathway this print view came from. This would be great for company brand uniformity and to help explain where a print out came from.  The custom company logo would be stored just like it is in the forms, but it would just be a built in option that every print-out from the interface will have the company logo and a certain header that would say that this record is taken from this database and page.  If you have a lot of different databases, it can become confusing to stakeholders where the print outs come from.  

hopefully this could lead to expanded records printing out letter templates on click as opposed to using a third-party extension.

Finally, it would be awesome if AI can be incorporated into AirTable interface to explain what is needed for a record to advance to the next stage of a project.  for instance, what specific fields need to be updated, and to what values.  Right now I use complicated formulas with If Then statements to evaluate and prompt responses, but it would be excellent if this was a feature built in.

[Databaser]

"Conditional multi-select options dependent on other field selections in forms" 

BIG +1 (in forms AND backend views); we've been asking this feature for years now 🫠

[egordin]

@Kelly_OShaughne  I love these updates - thank you and the Airtable team.

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to do manual order in a grid view in an interface. I see that there's a new "Sort By: Manual Sort Field" option, and I created a manual sort field and linked it to that field, but how do I edit the sort order? I can't seem to drag the records like I can in the Data view. Can you please clarify?

[Kelly_OShaughne]

@egordin apologies for the confusion, the update is for list view, not grid view, in Interfaces