New: List View

[Ayesha_Bose]

Hello! I’m Ayesha, a Product Manager here at Airtable. We’re so excited to share List View with you — a new view with you that helps you visualize the hierarchy of records across multiple tables:

What is List View?

List View is a new view type that makes it easy to create, edit, and manage hierarchical data —whether its projects and tasks, campaigns and deliverables, or a product roadmap and features —all within Airtable. 

List View is built for creating and managing simple or complex projects, whether a user is looking to manage a single product roadmap or marketing campaign, build company-wide OKRs, or even manage the episode production of a TV show’s season. 

Projects typically have a number of tasks, and with List View, you can easily organize those tasks based on importance, urgency, deadline, status, or another category.

This is the only view where you can see multiple fields across different tables at once.

How can I create a List View?

You can create this view in the Data tab from the bottom left, where you can create other Views like Calendar, Gallery, etc. In Interfaces, you can add a List element to your pages.

What are the key features of List View?

• You can use this view to visualize hierarchy across tables.
• Customize your rows to bring in all of the different fields across tables that you need to see:

• There are four levels of hierarchy that we support in List view today. We support three tables and the last level can include a linked record within the table to show nested records:

• You can prefix an existing checkbox field from your schema to show an intuitive way to check off your records:

Other questions?

You can check out our support article here.

—

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, please let us know if you have any questions.
This update is available now. If you aren’t seeing these changes reflected, please try clearing your cache.

[Ayesha_Bose]

@Jarvis: Yikes, that's unexpected! I'll follow up with our team on this, thanks for flagging. 

[ScottWorld]

@Ayesha_Bose 

There are a few bugs with List Views:

1. List Views don't work on Safari: 
https://www.loom.com/share/8f0213ea48884d5881c444e682e8d9d2

2. Manually sorting doesn't work:
https://www.loom.com/share/2246856bc362453c9c83c8460dc4aa14

Also, this is not a bug, but when I first read about this new feature, I was under the mistaken impression that list views would give people hierarchical filtering capabilities for data entry (e.g. choose a "Country", and then you are only prompted with a list of "States" that match that Country. Then, choose a "State", and then you are only prompted with a list of "Cities" that match that State). But after playing with the new list view, I see that it's just a new visual way of seeing linked records in Airtable. So it doesn't offer any new functionality per se — it's just a new cosmetic layer. Would be nice to have this hierarchical filtering functionality added to linked record fields, which is what you get in On2Air Forms & MiniExtensions.

[Ayesha_Bose]

@ScottWorld: Thanks for flagging these issues — the Looms are super helpful here! Please keep them coming as you run into anything.

• That Safari bug is weird, will flag to our team!
• Right now, we don't have any plans to support custom record labels, but if there are specific ones you're looking for, we'd love to get them in and you can submit them via this form.
• On manual re-ordering, this is on our radar. Right now, you can only drag and drop records across different parents, we don't support re-ordering within the same parent.
• There are a few new pieces of functionality in List view like allowing you to edit fields from multiple tables in one view, prefixing a checkbox field, show/hide sections with no children records, etc. Thanks for flagging those other tools, will take a look.

[Databaser]

Just want to leave a "+1" here for the ability to share a list view (eg read only). 

[Jack_Manuel]

@Ayesha_Bose 

• Row height alignment does feel off to me, although I can't give a good reason for this, just preference
• Again, level numbering is just a preference I think
• I know you offer the option to request labels but it's really off-putting, I just don't want to engage with the feature until I know for certain I can use the labels that work for my data
• The first use case I tried was for quotes, we have a project, which has attached quotes, which are comprised of sections, which are comprised of line items. 4-levels. I created a list view that incorporated quotes, sections and line items but the inability to group by project makes it unusable
• Off topic but the lack of a replies feature on the forum is making this thread quite annoying to follow

[Karlstens]

Thanks for getting back to me @Ayesha_Bose 😃

To further answer your questions;

• We're very excited about mobile support here and have this on our roadmap. We don't yet have a specific estimated timeframe, but we're working on it!

An Airtable List view on the Mobile App would be game changer for me - IF the Airtable designers can keep white space to a minimum, and cater for the simple action scrolling condesnsed lists of items (think of a shopping list).

I currently use OneNote for mobile for example (which has a sudo-list view when you start to employ check-boxes in the "Page") , which shows a check-box of approx 16 items and allows for the easy scrolling and checking off of items. It also allows to easily undo accidentally checked items quickly.  Comparing Airtable App, it shows 7 records - and isn't geared for the user to quickly check records off and scroll, or undo accidentally checked-off items. I'm hoping that the Airtable List View team can address this workflow.

• For Lookup fields, can you tell me more about why you need this instead of the linked record? Since you already have the linked record field in that table, you can show any fields from either of the tables in List view. If you have a specific example here, that would be super helpful.

Yes, absolutely. The easiest example is if you have a 3 table base; Projects, Tasks and Staff. A staff member will be assigned to a Project. A Project will have many tasks linked. The tasks will use a "Lookup" to the project to show the Staff owner. I would like to sort my List View on the Task table so that the Lookup "Staff" becomes Level 2, which would show Staff as the first row, and then their tasks (from all different projects) nested under each of the staff.

With the Staff tied to a Project, there's no nice/easy way to just show each staff member and a sub-list of Tasks (not projects, but tasks) with various task fields needed in that view.

We can get close to what I describe here, but I don't believe it's possible to do what I have in mind (as this stage in development).

Below shows Staff with their Projects listed (and then, we see the tasks but not as a vertical list)

And from the Staff table, we have a similiar situation, the tasks are not vertically listed, showing other task fields.

I think that I can only show the Tasks as listed records nested under staff owners only if Lookup Fields are supported within levels. (Or, again, base schema is updated so that Staff are linked into Tasks directly, but again, often changing base schema is undesirable)

[Databaser]

I'm sorry, looked over it: another BIG +1 for this as mentionned by @ScottWorld 👇

"Would be nice to have this hierarchical filtering functionality added to linked record fields"

[Scott_Gould]

This is a glorious update

My request would be to be able to have a level created from within the same table, such as using a Single Drop Down field - much like groups in Grid view

[Tobias_LGKR]

Very nice, but it desperately needs the ADD NEW RECORDS function.

[Tobias_LGKR]

It would also be really helpful if there were an option of inserting a fixed search input at the top of the list. Opening the filter options, selecting, executing is slow, when you are looking for something specific.