Rich Text to be compatible with CSV Import block?

[AD1]

Hello there,

Currently Rich Text is incompatible with a number of blocks, including CSV Import, and my team is having issues with importing large volumes of records into the database.
Are there plans to make Rich Text compatible with all blocks and CSV Import block in particular? If yes, what is the ETA?

Thanks,
Artiom

[Bill_French]

AD1:

Are there plans to make Rich Text compatible with all blocks and CSV Import block in particular?

I don’t know the answer because I can’t speak for Airtable, but support for rich-text in CSV is problematic for many reasons. CSV, after all, is a formatting standard that allows us to create data grids that are composed of plain text. It’s possible to include Makdown in CSV, but such tags would not be interpreted by Airtable long string fields even if enabled for markdown support - instead, the content would be interpreted literally. I haven’t performed any tests to be certain about this, but I believe this is exactly how Markdown tags would be interpreted in a CSV upload.

Remedy

I’ve done a number of integrations involving the transformation of rich-text formatting tags into Airtable rich-text fields with success. A good [simple] example is building automatic links without displaying the underlying URL - like this.

To achieve this requires an API transformation that is instrumented to craft the appropriate markdown tags and which could be done with a Script Block or an external process. Given that you have sizeable numbers of records, the latter is probably the right approach.

[AD1]

Hey Bill,

Thanks for your reply and insight!

Just a small clarification. We don’t need the CSV import to support transfer of formatted text (ex. bold, italic, etc) into Airtable. I would like it to function just like it does with Long Text field - simple data/text transfer, with no Markdown tags (possibly ignoring tags? sort of a cut down version, due to CSV format limitations).

Best regards,
Artiom

[Bill_French]

AD1:

We don’t need the CSV import to support transfer of formatted text

AD1:

having issues with importing large volumes of records into the database.

Okay - so what are the issues? Can you be more specific?

[AD1]

When you import the CSV file the Rich Text field is not available (grayed out) to import data. Records are being created with empty Long Text/Rich Text fields, despite data being available in input file. See the image below.

[Bill_French]

AD1:

When you import the CSV file the Rich Text field is not available (grayed out) to import data.

Yep - I think this is a fundamental data type mismatch. Even though you want just plain text imported, the block is likely designed to prevent the likelihood that most users would be happy with plain text. Your only option, at this point, is to use an API process or a Script Block.