July product updates

[Rose_K]

Hello Airtable Community!

We wanted to gather all of July’s product updates in one place, to make sure we keep you in the loop.

Here is a list of changes, big and small, that we introduced in July!

General Product Updates:

• Pro and Enterprise workspace users can now star, or favorite, their most frequently used views to add them to the easily accessible “My favorites” section at the top of the view sidebar.
• We have now added “fuzzy” searching to several inputs across the product including:
  • The “Add collaborator” input
  • The Field search input (which is used when you sort/filter)
  • The Workspace & base switcher
• We have consolidated the view menu, so you can now rename, edit the description of, duplicate, print, and delete a view all from the same menu.
• The behavior of our new “Add record” button has been tweaked to allow for a better data entering experience, allowing the record to “hang” so you can enter information, before the records pops up to the rest of the table.

Automations:

• You can now preview emails sent out by email automation actions, before testing them.
• The “At scheduled time” automations trigger has grown more robust, and now supports:
  • Daily intervals
  • Monthly intervals
  • A “One time interval” for that special case where you’d like to build an automation that only needs to fire only once on a specific day/time.

[Olpy_Acaflo]

kuovonne:

Meanwhile if every monthly post of updates turns into a thread of complaints, that erodes the motivation to continue the bits of information that we’re being given in these monthly updates.

Yes, that’s not wrong at all!

@Taylor_Savage @Rose_K @Adam_Minich

Just because the Airtable DEV delivers a fine improvement that almost nobody will talk about in the community or a new feature that was not requested by the community, it should not be seen as something that is rejected on that basis.

This would be a very bad return for AT’s DEV initiatives that are not the result of a misguided dream but are based on arguments and thoughts that the Community does not have the exclusive right to produce.

But it is true that there are still a lot of UI / UX related features or String processing that have been asked for but have not been followed up or even considered for feasibility for years.

To put many more Customers in the very satisfied crowd, I still think that Airtable’s future (?) CUSTOM-VIEW (VIEW is a major part of Airtable’s UI / UX) should be a “Choose your own pizza topping” on top of a dough and baking that would remain the immutable (by airtable’s Customers) backbone, so that the Base’s building does not collapse.

And that the VIEW properties should absolutely become CRUD’abled by javascript, at least from the Custom App API.
But maybe the original AT architects didn’t foresee this in 2015 so a solid and delicate underpinning would be needed now to achieve this.
I’d be curious to hear from DEV on this.

[ScottWorld]

kuovonne:

Your business is not Airtable’s priority.

If they don’t prioritize a consultant who has 200+ clients (i.e. 200 ears to the ground), they’re missing a key piece of the puzzle with their platform.

For example, Claris has calls with their FileMaker developers every single month to gain feedback on real-world usage of their products.

When a hole is big enough, it usually generates a lot of attention on this forums (and probably elsewhere), and it gets patched.

I disagree with this, and my proof of this is all the feature request threads in the #show-and-tell:product-suggestions category that have been ongoing for (literally) years, and ignored by Airtable. Even a simple response such as: “This will never be on our roadmap.” would do wonders.

Again, I love Airtable. My consulting business is based on Airtable. I’m in the trenches everyday with Airtable. But because I’m in the trenches everyday, consultants like me have a very unique perspective that Airtable may want to value.

[Databaser]

kuovonne:

Meanwhile if every monthly post of updates turns into a thread of complaints

Not that I’m the one who has to “defend” @ScottWorld here, but when it’s good, it’s also mentioned by Scott. Or should we stop doing that too since no one is apparently reading along? :man_shrugging:

Sync multiple sources to a single table Announcements

Wow! Huge improvements! :cowboy_hat_face: :horse_racing: :raised_hands: Question: When syncing external sources to a destination table in Airtable, can you edit those records within the destination table in Airtable? Or, does this act identically to syncing internal sources, where we can only edit the data from the source?

Incoming webhooks for automations :sparkles: Announcements

Nice! This is pretty awesome! This is a really big deal. :smiley: :raised_hands: One feature request for webhooks: In addition to sending JSON payloads to the webhook, it would be very cool if we also had the alternative option to send data to the webhook via simple URL parameters. Thanks for creating this! :partying_face:

Automate email digests with 3 new features :rocket: Announcements

Yay!!! Very exciting additions!! :sunglasses: :partying_face: :raised_hands:

June Product Updates Announcements

Thanks, @Rose_K! You’re a superstar! :star2: :sparkles: These are truly fantastic updates for the month of June! :cowboy_hat_face: :raised_hands: Love the persistent “New Record” button at the bottom of the screen! :grinning: p.s. One feature request that 2 of my clients really needed this week: Please allow us to make the column headers taller, so we can reduce the widths of our columns but still see the full field names. Maybe we can see this improvement in July? :wink: :pray: :pray: …

I think Airtable should be very grateful that at least one of us is always putting the finger where it hurts and informing why users are leaving the platform. That’s annoying I can imagine, but also gold from a product quality point of view. That, and the fact that he’s one of the top contributors in this community, could also be a reason to give him some slack.

Again, only my modest opinion :slightly_smiling_face: We all have our style to express our love for Airtable :smiling_face_with_halo:

[kuovonne]

Databaser:

We all have our style to express our love for Airtable :smiling_face_with_halo:

[ScottWorld]

Thank you so much, @Databaser, for defending me!! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

And thank you for pointing out that I am one of the world’s biggest cheerleaders for Airtable! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: :partying_face: :balloon:

I discuss BOTH the good AND the bad! (And I don’t understand why that’s so hard for some people!)

Many thanks, @Databaser!! :grinning: :pray: :pray: :pray:

[Rose_K]

Hey folks!

I hope everyone is doing well and as always, thank you for transparency within the discussions above. I just wanted to step in and say: as a growing startup, we are working on building processes to improve our product roadmap’s transparency for our users—especially in the Community. Our teams have read every message in this product updates thread, plus many other threads besides this one, and we do pass along the feedback and feature suggestions mentioned here.

That being said, this thread has gotten pretty off-topic from July’s product updates and there are comments above that do not adhere to our code of conduct. Together, with all of you, we want to create and nurture a community that is kind, respectful, and helps people to be the best creators they can be. To be clear, that doesn’t mean keeping your ideas and feedback to yourself, we love that you share with us, but it does mean leading with empathy and kindness in our interactions with each other. Moving forward violations of these terms will be documented and addressed accordingly.

We are actively exploring ways to provide more transparency into what we are working on, what we aren’t, and how to improve our ideation process. I know it’s probably frustrating that we can’t say more at this point but, to us it’s important that we only share what we know we can deliver on.

This monthly post of product updates is intended to try to keep folks up to date on past product changes of all sizes, and I’m currently working on a project to make this process more streamlined.

I’ll share more as I know it, and I thank you all for being so passionate and sharing your feedback here so I can pass it along.

Thanks all,

• Rose

[Karlstens]

Crickets from Rose? … Rose_K liked my post, meaning that she and other staff are reading and engaging in this very thread. Take the time to be kinder and less abrupt when working through these limitations, and perhaps your requests might be better responded too. (I work as a dev, and I can tell you that the squeaky wheel does NOT get the oil, quite the opposite in my experience).

Like I said in my post, I asked for a feature request in June 2021, and they implemented it in July 2021. How did I ask for the request? Kindly, with screenshots, clear explanations, through their correct feature enhancement support form, and then I left positive support feedback upon my request being investigated.

I’m posting in this thread to share my appreciation of @Rose_K taking the time to post “What’s New” (and also taking the time to read and like my post), as I greatly enjoy reading about new features, regardless of if my direct ongoing problems have been solved or otherwise. And a shout out to @kuovonne who is also a legend that’s helped me out, spending her own time to help me with my problem. Community spirit is what we need, especially in stressful times like many of us are currently under.

[David_Solimini]

@Karlstens she responded right above you.

[Karlstens]

Yah, exactly (but regardless, off topic and I’ve made my point).

I’ve been using the July updates, they are super useful. I’ve also sent some feedback on some slight adjustments that they could use. Thanks again team AT.

[Katerie]

Can you share the script that you use to do this? This would be immensely useful to my client.

Here is a script that can sort linked records in reverse chronological order automatically, using a record date field that you specify. (E.g. the creation date of the linked record.)

Before using this in an automation, I recommend modifying the script as shown here. Otherwise, it may overload the memory limits.

Note that this can only be used to organize the links in one of two reciprocally linking tables. If you try to use it to reorder the reciprocal links in the linked table, it will trigger an infinite loop and rapidly consume your monthly automations. This unfortunately means that one of the reciprocally linking tables can have its linked records organized by date (or anything else, really). This is the same behavior that you would see if trying to use the batch update app to organize linked records; organizing the links in one table messes them up in the reciprocal table. (Then again, maybe they changed this; if so please let me know!)

The script can be modified to sort linked records by other fields (including numerical fields), and to do multidimensional sorting (e.g. sort first by date, then by a number, then by name).