Date Automations

[Al_Yoder]

I can create a date automation using “exact date” or one of the other specific choices I’m given, but I would like to have an automation (email sent) run every Monday (or whatever day of the week I want) but I don’t see that as an option. Surely this must be possible. Can someone tell me how? Thanks

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Al_Yoder!

A formula field set to the formula below will return the number 0 if today is Sunday, 1 if today is Monday, 2 if today is Tuesday, etc.

WEEKDAY(NOW())

So you could have your automation trigger on “When a record matches a condition”, and choose that formula field matching 1 as one of your conditions.

You could also create a new view that is filtered to show you only the records you want, based on the results of that formula field (plus any other fields that you want to filter on). Then, your automation would trigger on “When a record enters a view”.

There are 2 things to note here:

1. The formula above will change weekdays around midnight in GMT/UTC Time Zone. (It will likely trigger around 8-15 minutes after midnight, because dates & times don’t update immediately in Airtable.) To use a different time zone than GMT/UTC, you’ll want to change your formula to look like this:

WEEKDAY(SET_TIMEZONE(NOW(),'Canada/Vancouver'))

You can find a list of supported time zones here:

Airtable Support

Supported timezones for SET_TIMEZONE

The SET_TIMEZONE function will allow you to set the timezone for the data from a date type field. This is written in the form "SET_TIMEZONE(datetime, 'timezone identifier')," in which the...

For a more advanced discussion of time zones, you can check out my sample base & training video here:

Airtable

Time Zones: Working with multiple different time zones in Airtable - Airtable...

This Airtable base solves the problem of events taking place in different time zones, and users wanting to know what time those events are taking place in...

2. If you want the formula to trigger at a different time besides “around midnight”, you’ll want to add additional filters or conditions to account for the actual time when you want your email to be sent.

Alternatively, outside of Airtable, if you’re looking for a super simple way of scheduling automations, Integromat has a very simple yet very robust scheduler built into it. You simply type in the days & times when you want your automation to run.

[Al_Yoder]

Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply. I think I could implement what you suggest but what I hoped to do is maybe more complicated than I thought…& isn’t that always the case. What I hoped to do was have a table that would have entries for different days of the week so that every Tuesday, Thursday or whatever, specific emails would be sent to different groups. While I think that might be done I imagine I would have to create separate bots for every day…& that might not even be allowed on my free plan. I will look at google Tables to see what it can do. I know I can select daily actions for every week or every month, a feature airtable should have. If that doesn’t work I believe there is a gmail extension that allows emails to be sent weekly, etc. I had not heard of Integramat but I didn’t see anything relating to emails & airtable. Many thanks again!

[ScottWorld]

Al_Yoder:

I had not heard of Integramat but I didn’t see anything relating to emails & airtable.

You admit that you’ve never even heard of Integromat before (and you spelled it incorrectly, by the way), and then in the very same sentence, you say that you didn’t see anything relating to emails & Airtable. That doesn’t sound to me like you spent ANY time actually investigating the service, which is arguably the most advanced automation platform available for Airtable.

And yes, everything you want to do can be done natively with Airtable, or by using an automated platform like Integromat.