Updates to record details in Interface Designer

[MicahRoberson]

Hello everyone – Micah here from the product team at Airtable. While we’re super excited to continue updating our layouts in Interface Designer — especially Record Detail — we know that some of our most recent changes have been difficult to navigate. Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard and appreciated all of the feedback that has been shared. Today, we’re excited to release a few updates to help address some of the most critical issues. We’re still hard at work making these layouts even better, and while this release won’t address all of the feedback, we are continuing to listen to all of you and working to improve the overall experience.

Updates 

Starting today, you’ll see that “Sections” are now known as “Groups”. We’ve improved the way they work and brought some additional features and functionality to the Record Detail layout:

More options for visual customization and layout flexibility

• Groups now support an optional background color
• There’s now only a single, simplified type of Group, and it can support both rows and columns, all configurable via drag-and-drop on the canvas
• Fields in Groups can be resized to either stretch to fill the available space or pack to fit within a column of the Group
• Linked record visualizations have an optional toggle to allow linked record visualizations to span the full width of the page when using the full-screen record details layout.

More on-canvas controls. In addition to using the properties panel to build out your layout, we now have more ways to do the following directly from the canvas

• Add new Groups
• Add a Title, Description or Buttons to a group
• Add fields
• Delete and duplicate fields
• Hide / show labels for entire rows of fields

More options for supportive text. Fields now support Helper text and linked record visualizations now support descriptions

Any Record Detail layouts created before the prior launch or which were modified using the “Convert to legacy layout” option will remain unchanged. The “Convert to legacy layout” option will continue to be available as well. 

Thank you again for all of the thoughtful feedback thus far, and please continue to share more via the feedback form. There’s a ton we can build on this surface and we’re excited to continue improving and expanding the possibilities.