Markdown "friendly name" URLs from Long text fields into mail automation?

[0800-grizzly]

Hi,

We're working on moving automation mail (Gmail) content from the automations themselves to a separate table, where other than admins can maintain text.

In the mail content there may be markdown URLs with clickable "friendly names", e.g. [Book here](https://www.calendly.com). I copied the whole text from the automation to "Long text" fields with rich formatting enabled. This approach doesn't however produce markdown URLs, instead they print out the raw markdown syntax ('[Book here](https://www.calendly.com)').

Remembering that using CONCATENATE formulas for URLs works in achieving the "friendly names" I tried chopping up the mail content, and using a summarising CONCATENATE field as input for the automation instead of a Long text field. This works, producing "friendly name" clickable URLs.

However, we have URLs in various places in the content, so chopping these up becomes really tedious, if not impossible. A workaround is to have body content first with text telling the reader something like "you'll find the links at the end of this mail", but that is just confusing and plain bad UX.

Isn't there really a way for an automation to produce marked down URL direct from a Long text field? Or some other workaround..?

Rgds,

Björn

[Dimitris_Goudis]

Hey @0800-grizzly, 

The issue is that the email action can't accept HTML tags that will convert the markdowns to the final result. The only improvement you can make is to import a static image in your text which is not your scope. 

For a client of mine what I did is I used Make to automate the workflow. On Make the email action supports the input of HTML code. This means that you can create a fully branded email context with great UI and use its HTML code in your email action. In this code, you only have to replace the placeholders with your dynamic data.

Instead of Make you can use Zapier or Latenode. All those tools do the same work and work fine. Make your selection based on your stack and future needs.  

Feel free to reach out for any further questions about this case, very happy to help.

Thanks
Dimitris

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

@0800-grizzly 

You can get this to work natively in Airtable by using rich text fields.

Simply use the hyperlink feature of Airtable’s rich text fields (instead of using markdown), and those links will work in your automated emails.

Otherwise, if you need to use markdown, you’ll need to use Make’s Markdown to HTML module to convert your data to actual HTML, and then you can send your emails via Make.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

For example, here is one way that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances here.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hm I'm confused.  Here's a long text field with markdown in it:

And here's the email the automation sent out:

Generating a friendly URL from a long text field seems fine, so I think I don't understand what you're trying to do, sorry!

[ScottWorld]

Weird, that doesn’t work for me.

As you can see from my 3 screenshots below, I have the exact same setup as you.

The only thing that works for me is what I outlined above.

Maybe Airtable is improving this feature, and is slowly rolling it out. Or maybe this is some strange bug in Airtable. Not really sure what is going on here.

This should probably be reported as a bug to support@airtable.com.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

[0800-grizzly]

Thank you. As per Scott's later reply I realised I can use the rich text features to create a link that works.

Rgds,

Björn

[ScottWorld]

Oh, okay, I figured out what the problem is.

@TheTimeSavingCo is not using a rich text field… he is just using a long text field.

So here is the quick solution:

If you use a long text field, the markdown formatting will work.

If you use a rich text field, the markdown formatting will not work.

That’s the solution right there.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[0800-grizzly]

Thank you! Indeed, just using the create link feature of the rich text field did the trick. Dunno why I didn't thnk about this, and tried to use markdown instead 😄.

Rgds,

Björn

[0800-grizzly]

Thank you! Weird that this works for you, but not Scott or me. Scott had a solution using the rich text create link feature, I'll go with that.

Rgds,

Björn

[0800-grizzly]

Weird this doesn't work for or me, but it works for @TheTimeSavingCo!

Rgds,

Björn