New: Record templates

[Helen_Zeng]

Hi everyone! I'm Helen, a Product Manager here at Airtable and I'm very excited to announce that we're launching the new Record Templates feature to all Pro and Enterprise users.

This feature enables you to create templates for your frequently repeated projects and automatically create relevant tasks as linked records every time that template is used. 

With Record Templates, you will now be able to:

• Create pre-defined templates for the types of records you find yourself creating over and over again
• Link related templates together to bulk-create records across tables
• Set default field values (including date dependencies) on those templates
• Surface templates to end-users in interfaces as record creation options that they can further customize

Some example use cases:

• A creative team tracking asset delivery. The marketing team specifies the type of asset(s) needed, and the relevant tasks for that asset type are automatically added and linked to the request.
• A product team adding a new feature to the roadmap creates placeholder tasks for product, design, and engineering.
• A marketing team working on social media campaigns across multiple social media platforms, with different tiers of campaigns. 
  

How to get started:

Start creating templates in your base by navigating to the Tools menu on the top right. 

 

Set up your template for linked record creation in related tables by additional additional records

Include record template options in places where users can create records 

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Other questions? Check out our support article for more details on how to use the feature. 
We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, please let us know if you have any questions!

[ScottWorld]

@Helen_Zeng 

The FAQ’s on that support article seem confused.

FAQ #3 says this: Enterprise plans - 500 record templates per base (across all tables)

FAQ #4 says this: For Enterprise plan workspaces, each base can have up to 2000 record templates (across all tables)

[Karlstens]

Thanks for posting about this new feature @Helen_Zeng , I'm keen to see how it all works.

May I ask about the reasoning behind limiting Pro users to 100 templates? Considering that one Template itself can consume multiple template slots - I now worry that base admins may hit this limit fairly quickly - and then become stuck between a rock and a hard place.

By the very nature of templates, they are typically an all-or-none affair. By this I mean, say for example, what if I needed 128 templates to make my idea work, but ... I'm limited to 100? So now I have zero reason to gear any templates and I may as well just ignore the feature entirely.

From a user point of view, the limit seems very finicky due to one template being able to consume more than just one count of the limit. It punishes the user in a way where they'll need to steal from Peter to pay Paul when it comes to configuring their templates with sub-templates as each sub-template consumes from their 100 cap.

I guess I'd be a little more forgiving if the 100 template limit was only applied at the master/top level - but now users have to tip-toe around how many sub-templates each template consumes - just doesn't feel right at all.

Perhaps I'm over thinking this feature limitation, and it won't be a problem in practice. But 1 Project template with 9 sub-templates = 10, so that's a max of 10 Project templates for my base, which could have dozens of tables... 100 templates per table I could understand, but 100 per base?

Administrators will need to get their calculators to understand the potential for breaching this 100 limit before transitioning their previous Single Select field and Automations (that mimic template behaviour). My guess is many may not see any use in Templates due to the hard limit of 100 per base.

[Helen_Zeng]

@ScottWorld: Thanks for catching that! We fixed the typo earlier this morning

@Karlstens: We had typically seen that level of advanced template and tables usage with Enterprise workspaces, whereas Pro workspaces tended to have more straightforward and slightly simpler cases -- hence the lower limit. Thank you for your feedback about the template limits for Pro though and how it impacts your use cases though, it's something we'll take under consideration. 

[demi]

Hey @Helen_Zeng, 

this looks like a very useful feature. We are on a Pro plan, but for some reason it is locked to us. Are you progressively rolling it out or is it available only to specific Pro plans?

[Databaser]

@Helen_Zeng, being to set a "relative date" (when creating a "new record") is a very useful feature. Are there any plans on adding this to the automation features or perhaps even as an extra option under the date field type?

[seanpmgallagher]

@Helen_Zeng, we are having the same issue as @demi. We're on a pro annual plan, but we do not have access to the record templates. It tells us we need to upgrade to Pro. I've tried reaching out to Airtable support multiple times via the chat bot, but can't get a human to respond.

[Ruth_Nelson]

@Helen_Zeng, When using the record templates, is there a way to add links to existing records rather than create new linked records in the linked table?

[Helen_Zeng]

@Ruth_Nelson You should be able to specify that linked record field should link to existing records by hovering over the field's dropdown menu and changing it to "link an existing record to this field" instead!

[Gary_Kavanagh]

Hi @Helen_Zeng, I'm really interested in this feature for a project I'm working in with enterprise license and before I knew it was coming was manually building out very similar functionality using special records marked as templates via single select options and using automations looking for that to pull data from them and link to parent project through automation hook ups. 

This feature seems tailor made to do what I was trying to accomplish and more, however it doesn't work in the directional flow I want in our base and I cannot discern why from the support documentation. I have a project record in my main table and want to make a template for it to create sub-tasks in the adjacent table. But only some linked record fields allow creating new records, and others can only connect to existing records, and is a small icon indicating allowed sub-record creation. Why some can and others can't isn't explained, and in the case of the base I'm working in task record templates can create new projects, but not the other way around which is backwards from what I want, a task can also create one other type of record that exists above project level which is again backward from intended flow. I saw you can make templates from lists, so I built a list forcing hierarchy to put project record above related task, but attempting to produce a template from that relationship produces an invalid relationship error message and does not get created. 

I thought possibly which table made the link first maybe mattered for which can be parent, but creating new linked record fields didn't seem to correct issue. Is this a bug or is there something I'm not understanding about why template sub-record flow is restricted in some cases and not others. 

[Karlstens]

@Helen_Zengmy initial feedback on templates - this drop down that's used to selected pre-existing records needs to be made way more obvious.