New Beta: Record Templates

[Priscilla_Choi]

Hi everyone!

I’m Priscilla, a UX researcher at Airtable on the Automations team. We wanted to tell you about a new feature that our team has been working on called Record Templates, which will help you manage programs, projects, and tasks more efficiently.

With this feature, you will be able to:

• Create templates for the types of records you find yourself creating over and over again
• Set pre-filled default field values on those templates
• Create new records using those templates or apply the template to an existing record
• Link multiple templates together to bulk-create records across tables

We are still working on additional functionality, but will release the current version of Record Templates to a small group of customers for early access and feedback. As a participant in our Record Templates Beta, you will be able to access Record Templates on base(s) of your choice, starting September 14, 2022. After you’ve started using it, we’ll set up time to chat with you and get your feedback.

If you’re interested in participating, please fill out this form by September 14, 2022 and we’ll be in touch if you’re a good fit!

[Karlstens]

@Dean_ArnoldI've found that by gearing one template with an automation script, you can get a little bit more mileage out of them - but personally found the limit of 100 templates per base frustrating - and I haven't leveraged record templates because of this one limitation in itself.

[jjl-pdx]

Just want to say these templates are massively helpful for my use case. 

One request is a way to create a template from an existing structure. So I already have a project and set of tasks with dependencies... can I just "make this into a template" somehow? This would make it easier to maintain the template, and "visually see" how the tasks are mapped with dependencies and such. I realize there are some details that would need to be sorted-out... 

Or, if you just enhanced the template creation interface so you can see the relation of the linked items (tasks) in a Gantt chart, and even edit them that way... That'd pretty much do it.

One more helpful enhancement would be to have a way to "weight" a template. We have projects that are of different scales - so small, medium and large. At the moment, I'll have to create and maintain a template for each variation. Would be nice if we could just make a "medium" template, and then could apply a weighting that'd affect dates & some other variables.