Calendar view enhancement requests (reminders, delete prompts, persistent view)

[Dean_Toland]

I would love to see some kind of reminder or alert system for items that are setup to display on Calendar views. One of my bases has a table that is used to keep track of follow-up calls to potential customers. If they’re called once and we schedule a follow-up, I have a column with a date/time format and a calendar based on that field. Without alerts, users are advised to check their calendar each morning and afternoon for upcoming scheduled follow-ups, but it would be great when adding a date/time to a column that is tied to a calendar if there could also be an option for reminders or alerts. Maybe something like Outlook reminders, 15 minutes before the time and the option to snooze for 5 minutes or dismiss completely.

Additionally, I’ve noticed that the view of records in the Calendar doesn’t persist when you leave and come back in. For instance, this table has over 1200 records but only some are going to have follow-up times on them. I change the view in the top right corner from “all records” to “records with dates” but it doesn’t stay that way if I leave and return. Due to the nature of the table and its size, displaying all records will never be useful so I’d like to avoid having to change it each time.

And finally, something I just noticed and am very concerned about, is the “delete” option when viewing an item from the Calendar. I just tested it and it doesn’t just delete/clear the info in the relevant date/time field, it deletes the entire record. There’s no prompt to confirm anything, so a simple misclick could completely remove a record from the table and this is a bit scary. I would think it would be far more often needed to simply clear the date field than to delete an entire record, especially from the Calendar view, but maybe it could be solved by asking which they’d like when clicking delete? I think any kind of data removal could benefit from a bit of an extra step to be sure that removal is intended.

Thanks!

[Jens_Schott_Knu]

@Katherine_Duh Would love a customized reminder function. Looking to use it for contract management.

[Mandy_Williams]

We would also love a reminder/alert function, particularly as a help for follow-ups on funding opportunities (we are a small nonprofit).

[Mikaela_Smith]

@Katherine_Duh I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE Airtable. Seriously, I am willing to try to do just about anything I can to keep every single thing I do, use, or have to worry about in Airtable. I am currently trying to advocate for my team at work to select Airtable as our core project management tracking tool. There are so many amazing conveniences that are baked into Airtable that would make it a wonderful tool to use, but not having an alerts, reminders & notifications option built in is a deathblow. I cannot advocate for this tool knowing that, unless someone is tech and integration tool savvy, it cannot meet one of the very most basic and core functions of a project/task management tool.

I personally have been using Zapier integrations, but I’ve finally just had to just stop using it. There are two major issues that make Zapier unusable for me. The first is that there is no “trigger” for when updates are made to a field in Airtable. For example, if I change the due date of a project in Airtable, there is no Zapier trigger to find and update the google calendar date.

In a similar vein to my first issue, the second problem I have is that if I delete something because it no longer applies, my calendar event is not removed. There isn’t a way to tell Google Calendar to delete something that I remove from Airtable. I think this could possibly be resolved by creating an additional Zap, but what it all really comes down to is how difficult this is to do.

The inability to feel confident that my Airtable and Google Calendar are reliably sync’d does more harm than good for me. I’m going to constantly run into the worry that my calendar isn’t accurate, that I’ve missed an important deliverable, or that I killed myself to meet an inaccurate due date. It’s easier for me to just kill the calendar integration and accept that I’m just going to have to constantly check Airtable to make sure I don’t miss something.

Especially considering you already offer the incredibly helpful calendar view tool, I feel like this should be such a doable, low hanging fruit, bang for your buck, slam dunk, easy win option you could add to this platform. I’ll keep my fingers crossed this comes soon.

[Patrick_Ford]

@Katherine_Duh Any progress on this? Reminders/notifications for the date field is essential! As others have said, Zapier just doesn’t cut it, and Airtable is too awesome to not have this feature!

[Dave_Mackey]

Love AirTable, but this is really making me look at other options. :frowning:

[Sanshiro_Cabana]

you can have reminders if you suscribe to the ical and add the start and end date on every task, you don’t have to go from airtable

we ask for a native option :slightly_smiling_face:

[Jay_DeDapper]

It would be great to hear any update on progress from an Airtable team member. Airtable can’t really be used effectively for project management without native notifications. And no, Zapier is NOT the solution. Zaps are great for simple, somewhat unusual things that probably make no sense to build natively. But notifications are pretty much table stakes for Project Management software and since that’s one of Airtable’s advertised use cases, the lack of notifications is a serious problem. I love Airtable but can only roll it out to my teams in limited cases right now because of this (and the lack of conditional logic but I’ve already posted on that!). Thanks.

[Phoebe_Flynn]

+1 for the notification, alerts, and reminders system! It’s a simple feature that would greatly enhance the workflow. At the moment I’m trying to convert my current Office 365 calendar system to Airtable so that my team’s project management is more interactive and extensive than simply plugging in booking times. I’m absolutely loving the diversity of tools and customisable options of Airtable… if we got the notification/reminders/alerts as a feature, I will honestly use Airtable for every work place and freelance job.

So please develop this feature, it would be a lifesaver!

[Helen_Demoz]

• 100,000 for reminder and alert notifications. However, please consider making the notifications and alerts work with fields that contain DATEADD formulas as well as calendar fields.

New to AirTable and just seeing that the two fields (date fields and formula fields using dateadd) work differently even though they’re both dates.

It would be extremely helpful if you could make formula fields using dateadd to show up in calendar view as an option as well. Pleeeeease :slightly_smiling_face:

[Octavio_Lopez_S]

Yes!!!
It would be great!
Also, how about notifications coming from formula fields (not only from text fields) so notifications can be automated,