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

[kuovonne]

Don_McGray:

Control-click/command-click a table to open it in a new tab

I just discovered that control-clicking a base in the workspace opens the base in a new window as well. This is a huge timesaver for me! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

:dizzy: :dizzy: :dizzy:

[ScottWorld]

Kamille_Parks:

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

That’s not what I meant. What I meant is that I’d like to see this feature rolled out to all of Airtable, not just limited to gallery view (and not just limited to those people who read the support page).

For example, if you drag-and-drop multiple attachments onto an attachment field in grid view, I’d like the same pop-up window to appear.

In other words, I would like this feature to be entirely discoverable by all users across the entire platform.

[Kamille_Parks]

So just more universal? It would be just as hidden a feature without some visual indicator, especially since the view that focuses on attachments has had it for years and people still didn’t know it was there.

Users wouldn’t suddenly know this was possible if its also possible in Grid View. You still have to guess (correctly) that you can bulk create records through uploading attachments by trying to do it in the first place

[ScottWorld]

Kamille_Parks:

Users wouldn’t suddenly know this was possible if its also possible in Grid View. You still have to guess (correctly) that you can bulk create records through uploading attachments by trying to do it in the first place

This is a good point. If Airtable would give you & me a day to figure this out, I’m sure that we could figure out something incredibly awesome for everybody! I’ll need them to pay for our lunches & our coffees. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

[Joseph_Roza]

I am also wondering about this feature regarding filtering of linked records.

Any additional information that can be offered would be much appreciated.

[Allen_Moldovan]

Same, some insight would be obliged

[Kamille_Parks]

They’re in a tough spot. You wanna highlight every nook and cranny of the program so people know what’s possible, but if you’ve been using Airtable as long as we have, one might get annoyed by all the popups/dialogs, etc. But even still there’s going to be stuff you miss. I have no solutions, I’m just here to vibe

[Nathaniel_Grano]

@Don_McGray can you elaborate on

• 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:

I assumed this would mean that when configuring a field of type “Link to another record” there would be a setting to add a filter (much like the existing setting to filter based on a specific view) but I don’t see any such setting:

[Allen_Moldovan]

Is possible filter linked records? Base design

Thanks a lot, is an interesting solution, I understand it, but it don’t work with differents contracts on at same time.

If this is the @Jose_Martinez1 product suggestion that was rolled out, I would lose it.

Please airtable let it be true!

[Karlstens]

Well, I finally cracked it and spent the weekend coding my own Filtered Linked Record field functionality within the Script Extension - so it’ll be no surprise to me now I’ve spent hours creating this app, that Airtable will finally announce and release this feature. :grinning_face_with_sweat:

Watching the filtered records return in my app feels good, I get a very warm and fuzzy feeling - and can’t help but AT are crazy for not already including this feature, year on year.

Unfortunately for me, I hadn’t realised that Script Extensions nor the field buttons to trigger them still don’t work in Interfaces, so my solution locks the user to the base view until Scripts Extensions and field buttons are added to interfaces (or interface buttons are geared to work with Script Extensions).