Hunting for Fields is my #1 time waster in Airtable. I spend lots of time scrolling horizontally through column headings, or vertically through the Fields Pane. I have 5x more fields than I do Views in most Tables and I interact with them (i.e. need to find them) more often too.
Why not add the “Sections” functionality for Fields, like the one that Views have?
If well-designed, you don’t have to recall anything - just ask in natural language. For power users who do this stuff all day, this is not a big stretch.
Bingo. The vast Airtable no-code audience typically doesn’t need power-user features. Imagine trying to explain to them a search feature that doesn’t look at their data. :winking_face:
Perhaps I don’t have enough experience with natural language querying, but I think the technology for using natural language to interact with computers in everyday apps isn’t there yet. It is getting better and people should certainly work on it, but the preponderance of mouse-driven interfaces is winning now. For now, mouse-driven interfaces are much easier to create and to learn.
Ya’ know how I often say something and three years later it becomes a reality? This is one of those somethings. In less than three years, someone will become wealthy for building a high-productive command-line interface to Airtable that uses no more than your voice or a few keystrokes to do magical things in Airtable that would otherwise take forever with a pointing device.
To all you aspiring developers out there - if you are looking for a partner to act as the chief architect for this idea, give me a shout - bill.french@gmail.com.
After thinking about this, it occurs to me that Airtable folks might not want to prioritize features that encourage users to add lots of fields to an existing table, rather than linking records to a new one. It could facilitate poor data design.
However, I think this could represent on opportunity: make it easy to convert a field group into a linked table either when creating the grouping, or later. This being a natural path for new users to understand and create linked tables.
