Oops! Editable shared view update

[Jordan_Scott1]

Hi all -

I hope your week is going well. As you may have noticed this morning, editable shared views was accidentally enabled for all Airtable users and has since been rolled back.

First, I would like to apologize for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused and acknowledge that we know this is a feature that the community is excited about. It has been great to watch people become experts in 30 minutes to share with the community and see all the excitement on Twitter. We know how upsetting it may be that this was accidentally enabled and we want to share some insights into what happened with all of you.

We know that collaboration in Airtable is top of mind for many of you (us too!), and the editable shared view feature is one of the many ways we’ve explored making that experience more impactful. However, we’re not currently prioritizing the development of this feature and are instead focusing on solving this problem in a more comprehensive way.

As Peter mentioned during Table Talk last month, we are planning to do a holistic revamp of permissions and updates to sharing in Airtable and do believe that there’s work to do to make collaboration in Airtable easier, more secure, and more scalable. We want to ensure we are delivering the best possible solution to you to solve this problem and have a team actively working on solutions that we hope to be able to share later this year.

We also recognize that many of you have ideas about changes you’d like to make to Airtable’s collaboration experience. We’d love to hear those ideas in the thread and why they’d be impactful for you. We’ll be taking that feedback, along with everything you’ve shared related to this problem in the Community in the past to help guide our future thinking.

Thank you for your understanding, we really appreciate it and apologize again for any confusion.

[Databaser]

I think this is a case where Airtable should embrace the Stockdale paradox (Jim Collins - Concepts - The Stockdale Paradox😞 confront the brutal reality of this mistake and it consequences for your paying/product selling customers. So no, there’s nothing wrong with “a bit spicy”.

That being said, it’s a new day and we’ll just add this to the list (being an Airtable user for 6 years or so now) and move on.

[koh_daniel]

I can understand why Airtable can’t make this feature official.
This is directly linked to their pricing model, in a very very negative way.

Solution?
I really wish Airtable provides “per base” or “per data” pricing model on top of “per user” pricing model. That, i think is the only solution to make this feature official.

Current pricing model is unreachable for customers with a limited number of bases but many users.

[Ricardo_Pardo]

Que desencanto tan grande!!!
Habilite más de 5 vistas para poder trabajar en equipo que hace tiempo lo necesitaba… y ahora esto?
No entiendo que ha pasado, pero mucho menos entiendo la decisión de “Sin embargo, actualmente no estamos priorizando el desarrollo de esta función…” sabiendo que es muy esperada y tanta alegría generó.
Ojala revean la situación.

[Pavel_Neumann]

yes we know exactly how we would make you happy and we have it already programmed. But we won’t give it to you, we will give you something else. we don’t know when we give it to us either. I hope you’re looking forward to it. this is really so…… so many people are waiting for it. or at least lock the creation of new views. nothing.

[Rhams_Search]

Please make this functionality work!! It’s Airtable’s biggest blocker for my team as we work constantly with external clients.

[BSS_Automation]

How unfortunate that this is not a priority. I have a large working table and have shared the great flexibility of airtable to several other companies that have taken to now using AT. I however have found that I have now become limited in my use due to not being able to share a specific limited view with my warehouse staff that they can use - update and keep the workflow happening. I don’t want to them to see all the customer private information or the costs involved or the other sensitive information I have in the full base. I just want them to see the limited information pertaining to them. I have spent days and days trying to create a synced base for them to be able to edit and then try to have all the updated information sync back to the main base. It has been a nightmare and I am still trying to get it to work because the automation linking of two tables although says it’s worked doesn’t. PLEASE, PLEASE, let us have the editable limited shared view. Life and working with AT would be so much more pleasurable.

[ScottWorld]

I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for Airtable to implement this feature. It could be years or never, and if it does come out, it might be restricted to customers paying $10k per year for the enterprise plan.

You might be able to implement some workarounds to achieve a similar effect, such as using links to prefilled forms, and then using automations to update existing records. But that’s a pain.

In the meantime, the only way to get the full functionality that you’re looking for is to pay for a 3rd-party portal tool. The current Airtable portals are MiniExtensions.com, GlideApps.com, Softr.io, Pory.io, and StackerHQ.com. I don’t know if there are any others that are currently available.

p.s. As an expert Airtable consultant, I have experience with all of these portals and am available to help people set these up:

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[Databaser]

It is THE MOST blocking factor in Airtable imo.

Another simple example: I’ve built a digital directory for a national organisation with local chapters. Without giving them access to the entire base, I can’t even simply share a view of a local chapter to its president, to change their member data.

With the plan Airtable has, I’m probably going to have to ask each and everyone of them to create an Airtable account just for this, not to mention having to create an interface and no doubt paying more money than I’m already doing.

There are no doubt, like always, enough cons to this feature, but as a customer, it doesn’t outweigh the pros for me.

[Londya_E]

It would be nice if they would allow people to become enterprise users without a minimum number of users. I don’t get why they wouldn’t allow this. They would gain more enterprise customers who have the potential to grow, being that they would now have access to more features. :woman_shrugging:t4:

[Julian_E_Post]

While we’re waiting for an official solution, the workaround using prefilled forms and automation is really not bad.

This video from No-Code Ireland shows to to do it (and it’s pleasantly cheeky):

I made a video that describes shows how to do it as well (you’d need to add a button like in the above video to get full functionality)