New: Updates make creating and collaborating easier in Airtable

[Don_McGray]

Hi all,

My name is Don and I’m a product marketing manager here at Airtable (for those of you I’ve had the opportunity to connect with already, hi again!).

I wanted to share that we’ve published a blog post today outlining many improvements and iterations we’ve made over the past months to make it easier to create and collaborate in Airtable.

For context, much of this work came from a desire to make our product simpler: A team of engineers, designers, product managers, writers, and well, marketers like me, have been spending time talking to our users about what frustrates or confuses them in Airtable. From there, we built a list of improvements we wanted to roll out to our customers.

And today, you’ll see much of that work in Airtable—some of these updates you may have seen already, and some are new, but we wanted to share them all in one place.

At this point, I’m guessing you’re ready to hear the updates:

• Easy add with a single click, you can now easily add automations, views, extensions, and more.

• Quick groups make it easy to group your records by any field with a click, with some suggested grouped fields already present for you.

• Quick sort works the same as quick groups: Sort by any field in your base with a click.

And there’s more:

• Quickly add yourself as a collaborator: Now, you’ll appear as the first user in a dropdown so you can assign yourself tasks
• Upload multiple attachments easily—a much-requested feature from the community
• Search for specific fields in grid view
• Use field IDs when configuring form URL share links
• Open automation actions with a right-click
• Easily locate field IDs in the field manager (@kuovonne and the team at Gap Consulting, who’ve both talked about workarounds to get this info before)
• Improved collaborator autocomplete when typing comments on a record
• Filter linked record IDs so you can sort by linked records (like “quarter” or “project”), @Jose_Martinez1 , I think you requested this one 🙂
• Control-click/command-click a table to open it in a new tab
• Check off completed records with a new “x” icon in the checkbox field—shout out to @ScottWorld for the inspiration on this one!
• See more accurate error messages after uploading videos so you can take action

That’s a lot 😅 ! Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Don

[David_Solimini]

THIS is an excellent addition. I have three places where this dramatically simplifies an automation.

[Karlstens]

Thanks for sharing this update.

Regarding this addition;

Could we please see a “Find a field” within the Form View creation? It becomes exceedingly annoying to create a Form View for a table when there’s no easy method to search for the field (out of hundreds of possible fields) that needs configuring within the form.

Further to this, regarding the upload of Attachments - it would be great to see the feature (that’s almost hidden) found within the Gallery view, that allows the user to create multiple records upon bulk file upload when dragged onto the “Add record” circular widget. Perhaps there’s a reason this widget isn’t found within a Grid View, but I think it’s overly useful for those needing to know about it.

Also, importantly, when searching for a field via a Field ID, when the user searches for a Field ID, Airtable isn’t returning the field associated with the Field ID.

Here we can see that searching for fldMiCSXgCU2fBGX0 doesn’t return anything. Those of us writing scripts would greatly appreciate the ability to quickly lookup a failed field ID.

And now I think about it, a Base-centric field search would be super cool, one list to see and search them all - kinda like the new View search feature where it will show Views from other tables that match the search. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks again for the continued updates, keen to see some Page Designer love (please! pllleeeease!)

[Databaser]

Karlstens:

Further to this, regarding the upload of Attachments - it would be great to see the feature (that’s almost hidden) found within the Gallery view, that allows the user to create multiple records upon bulk file upload when dragged onto the “Add record” circular widget. Perhaps there’s a reason this widget isn’t found within a Grid View, but I think it’s overly useful for those needing to know about it.

Wow, I totally forgot about this :astonished: Don’t upload enough files in 1 go I guess.

[Karlstens]

I was so excited when I discovered this feature. It allows for, for example, the bulk upload of log files, where each log file will land in its own record, where it could then trigger an automation that will parse/process that log file into associated fields (say, if a more complex regex is needed to be executed via a script than what the Regex Calculation field has to offer).

Gallery is not just useful for images, but bulk uploading log files too :grinning_face_with_sweat: … which is why it makes sense to have this feature not just hidden away within a Gallery View.

[ScottWorld]

Karlstens:

Further to this, regarding the upload of Attachments - it would be great to see the feature (that’s almost hidden) found within the Gallery view, that allows the user to create multiple records upon bulk file upload when dragged onto the “Add record” circular widget. Perhaps there’s a reason this widget isn’t found within a Grid View, but I think it’s overly useful for those needing to know about it.

Wow. This feature really shouldn’t be hidden. I never knew about this.

[Allen_Moldovan]

Don_McGray:

Filter linked record IDs so you can sort by linked records (like “quarter” or “project”), @Jose_Martinez1 , I think you requested this one :slightly_smiling_face:

What’s this all about I don’t see it

[Kamille_Parks]

ScottWorld:

This feature really shouldn’t be hidden

The feature is documented the support article about Gallery View. I guess they could add some tooltip/popup or something saying “you can bulk upload” but I don’t any more of those cluttering the screen, personally.

[Vivid-Squid]

Allen_Moldovan:

nvm I still don’t see it, is this a scripting thing

You must have an attachments field in your table, in Gallery view select customize cards to choose your image field. Then you can drag a group of files from desktop to the + button.

[Allen_Moldovan]

Hi appreciate the how to, but I was referring to the linked record filtering addition as mentioned in earlier post. Any idea what that is all about?

[Allen_Moldovan]

Nvm, I see it… edit: nvm I still don’t see it, is this a scripting thing?

How bout we do something similar but for the config of the linked record field. EG limiting record selection to a filter rather than a view. Or here’s a novel idea, why not have both options.

That will put us one step closer to dynamic linked record filtering/cascading drop downs.

Woof just typing in the above sentence made me sigh. If only