New: Deep link a cell

[Jade_Roland]

Hi everyone,

I hope you’ve been well! I’m Jade, a Product Manager here at Airtable. We’ve got an exciting new feature that is live in Airtable today - you can now deep-link to a specific cell!

Prior to this feature being released, users were only able to copy & share the record URL - this wasn’t ideal for bases with a high volume of fields per record. Imagine you want to share a single field with your colleague, but your only option was to copy an entire record with every field! Now with our new feature, you will be able to copy and share links to a specific cell. This simplifies the link sharing experience, as well as make it easier to navigate in a base.

Using this feature is simple - right click on the cell you want to share, and click “Copy cell URL”. Now when you navigate to the base using that link, you’ll be brought directly to that specific cell. This feature works in the grid view, as well as the expanded record.

Here it is in the expanded record:

And here is the grid view!

We hope you’re as excited about this feature as we are. We look forward to hearing your feedback so we can continue to make Airtable a better experience, together.

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community forum!

Thank you for this new feature! I can see that this feature will make communication much easier when trying to diagnose issues.

Jade_Roland:

We look forward to hearing your feedback

What is the best way for people to provide feedback? Should people comment on this thread? Sometimes other feature announcements have included a link to a feedback form. Are you interested in having such a form?

I also anticipate that people will come up with new and unexpected use cases for these urls, including constructing these urls in formula fields.

[Karlstens]

Thanks for sharing this new feature. Briefly having a look now, it works well - now I’ll have to think of how I can leverage it. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

[Jade_Roland]

Thanks for your great question! Please feel free to add your feedback as a reply to this announcement. Excited to hear what you have to say!

[Karlstens]

I’ve realised my first use case - is it possible to get the cells Deep-Link URL via either Scripting Extension, Automation Script, or even a formula field?

[kuovonne]

Karlstens:

is it possible to get the cells Deep-Link URL via either Scripting Extension, Automation Script, or even a formula field?

It looks like a cell deep-link url has the structure
https://airtable.com/base_id/table_id/view_id/record_id/field_id

To see the result in the grid view versus the expanded view, there is the query parameter
?copyLinkToCellOrRecordOrigin=gridView

All of these components are available via scripting. The only aspect that is not available via scripting is whether or not the field is actually in the view.

Once you know all the IDs, it is very easy for a formula field to construct the url.

[Ruchika_Abbi1]

This is a great feature… would definitely use it in automations to point people to the next step in a workflow. However, it seems that you can’t specify the record-field combination, it just takes you to the field. Would be great to be able to say, “THIS field in THIS record”.

[kuovonne]

Ruchika_Abbi1:

However, it seems that you can’t specify the record-field combination, it just takes you to the field. Would be great to be able to say, “THIS field in THIS record”.

This is not my experience. There have been two new urls related features recently. One takes you to a field, and another takes you to a field in a specific record.

[matt_stewart1]

does this provide a way to get data from a cell to populate a separate doc? We have PDFs we use for design review that we have to manually load due dates from the project into. Can I link a cell so that the PDF auto loads the date I’m the PDF every time you open it?

[ScottWorld]

matt_stewart1:

does this provide a way to get data from a cell to populate a separate doc?

No, that is not possible. You would need to use external 3rd-party services for that.

There are dozens of different services out there that provide this functionality, such as Documint, Docupilot, PDF Generator API, PandaDoc, pdfFiller, PlumSail Documents, Formstack Documents, DocSpring, PDFMonkey, Anvil, PDF.co, and many more. You could even use plain old fashioned Google Docs or Microsoft Word as well.

All of these would need to be automated in some way. Some of them have native extensions for Airtable. Others would need to be automated by writing your own Javascripts or by turning to a low-code/no-code automation tool like Make, which doesn’t require any knowledge of coding.

[Ruchika_Abbi1]

you’re right… I missed that. I selected the specific cell and it does give me the URL for it. :+1:t5: