Email Automation Grid "Grid lines not displaying"

[Khuned_Sachdev]

Hi Community, I have an issue that would like help to solve.

We have an email sent our in automation once a records is in a “Review” stage. The email is sent, in part, as a Grid. Our field data is getting longer so we decided not to select the “truncked” option but the email sent are not showing gridlines (like I see in some examples here in the AT community posts).

This makes is not possible to understand which adjascent fields are in the same record. Any help would be appreciated.

This is how we see how others in this community said their look like…

[ScottWorld]

@Khuned_Sachdev

Unfortunately, there are several bugs in Airtable’s Automations, particularly for sending emails.

You’re actually lucky that you can see your data at all. I can’t get Airtable to even show me the data for linked records, lookup fields, and rollup fields. It just displays those fields as blank for me, even when those fields actually contain data. These bugs all happen when truncate data is turned OFF.

The best you can do is send an email to support@airtable.com to report it as a bug, and then pray that they care enough about this issue to fix it. Based on my own personal experience with reporting bugs to them, they don’t tend to fix bugs too often — so you may be waiting for months (or years) to see a fix.

In the meantime, you can do what I do, which is that I don’t rely on Airtable’s Automations for too many tasks. Instead, I typically turn to Make.com for most of my automations. It’s trickier to send a grid of records in an email using Make, because you need to know some HTML code to make it happen, but it is always 100% reliable and nearly 100% bug-free. And their support team really goes to bat to help customers solve problems (instead of just shrugging their shoulders). Although it might take a few days to hear back from their support team, they are always pretty great about solving any problems.

p.s. I also provide Airtable consulting for companies to help them setup their Airtable bases & their Make automations.

[Khuned_Sachdev]

@ScottWorld Thanks for the explanation. I’m surprised of the Airtable automation. They seemed like a well-funded outfit to me. But let me double-check with their real-time support chat and see what happens.

A question about using Make, as you’re experienced in it, and it’s something we have been exploring and would need professional help with it, when we do: once an integration is setup, is it really true that it can be left to run by itself in the mid to long-term? Do the connections break if there are some updates?

We are asking this as we are reallly moving towards no-code and part of the requirement we would expect is that we don’t have a technical team to monitor, or quick-fix this, if such a break occurs. So far, in keeping within the Airtable system, it’s never broken, so wanted to hear your experience with external inteagrations like Make and Zapier.

Rgrds,
Khuned

[ScottWorld]

Khuned_Sachdev:

A question about using Make, as you’re experienced in it, and it’s something we have been exploring and would need professional help with it, when we do: once an integration is setup, is it really true that it can be left to run by itself in the mid to long-term? Do the connections break if there are some updates?

Yes, Make.com can be left to run by itself, presumably forever. Updates to Airtable will not break anything because it uses Airtable’s REST API.

If Airtable ever decided to discontinue supporting the current version of their REST API, you would likely be given years to prepare for it.

If your company has a budget to hire a professional Airtable & Make consultant, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld

so wanted to hear your experience with external inteagrations like Make and Zapier.

In my personal opinion, Zapier is in a distant 2nd place behind 1st place Make. The good news is that Zapier is dramatically easier to learn & setup than Make, but the bad news is that it is significantly less powerful, less customizable, and more expensive than Make.

[Khuned_Sachdev]

Hi @ScottWorld , thanks for that. In the meantime, AT support has confirmed that my original question is not possible and a limitation of AT. Let us review internally and will connect if we decide to explore the Make route.