Double Click on Field Name - Restore Customize Field Functionality!

[Paul_Warren1]

Hello Airtable, Please, please please reverse this change!

Double-clicking on the field name now only modifies the name of the field. It is a pain to have to right-click to access this menu. I don’t want to be overdramatic and claim this will totally ruin Airtable, but it’s much less efficient than the old method.

I also noticed that when creating a new field, the field type is now the first dialog. Then we are prompted to put in a name. This is fine and I can get used to the new workflow. I understand that this reduces the number of times I use “Tab” to move between dialog boxes.

I love Airtable and hope it continues to make progress! Just not the progress I don’t like :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

[M_k]

Hi @kuovonne

Thank you for letting me know!

Your input in the community forum is greatly appreciated.

I find your posts very interesting!

Mary

[andywingrave]

Back on topic :smiling_face_with_halo:

I would love for Airtable to respond to this. It feels like an April fools joke.

[ScottWorld]

Wow, so I just got this new “customize field functionality” today, and as predicted, it is absolutely horrible:

1. First of all, now we can’t edit fields on mobile web browsers anymore, so now we’re required to use a desktop computer to make any changes to our fields. I would love for Airtable to please explain to me how this has made our lives easier. (Or maybe explain why mobile browsers have been shunned altogether in the product.)

2. Second of all, it makes absolutely no sense for the customization/creation of fields to be separated from the renaming of the fields. It was completely easy & straightforward before, and now they’ve made this a 2-step process that is unintuitive & ridiculous, especially for new users. I would love for Airtable to please explain to me how this made our lives easier.

Kamille_Parks:

2020 has been a month-to-month litany of absolutely-no-warning product updates. I said before that none of us knows what’s going on until after a decision has been made, which if I were to hazard a guess, is the real source of frustration about this and other changes. People begged for bold text for ages, and no one knew they were even considering that feature until they released a beta for rich long text fields.

This is such a great point, and this has been my biggest frustration as well — ZERO COMMUNICATION with their users. We have no idea what is coming, and then they suddenly change everything on us overnight.

I know that many of you don’t have a 30-year history with a software product like FileMaker that I do, but I can guarantee you that other database companies don’t treat their users like this. Users are not normally kept in the dark and then slapped in the face. Airtable just rolls out whatever they want without even considering the impact on us.

Yes, I get it. They’re rapidly evolving the product. And I fully expect a cloud platform to change & evolve on a regular basis — but could they give us some sort of a roadmap or some sort of a dialogue or some sort of an idea of what they’re working on?

This has been ESPECIALLY frustrating for me, since I have spent the last 4 months creating a major, 26-video training course on Airtable which is going to be released by a major company in less than 4 weeks. You guys have no idea how many “little things” are changed on a daily basis by the Airtable Team with no advance warning to us — renaming & relocation of dropdown menu option names throughout the system, renaming & relocation of buttons/menus throughout the system, tons of little functionality changes throughout the system, etc. Every time I completed one video, it was outdated the next day & had to be re-recorded. And now, because I had no advance warning of any of these new field changes, I just heard from the company that all 26 of my videos are now considered “out of date”. My course isn’t even released yet, and it’s already out of date.

I knew that my training videos would eventually become out of date, but Airtable decided that it was a good idea to change BASIC FUNCTIONALITY of creating fields — something that was actually working PERFECTLY FINE for 5 years? Or constantly moving menus around the system?

While I was recording my videos, they changed the location of “renaming views” 4 times. That’s right — they’ve changed the location of “renaming views” 4 times in 4 months. I expect a cloud platform to change & evolve over time — but why are they so erratic? Do they have any plan at all? Could they please give us some sort of a roadmap or keep us in the loop or have some sort of discussions with us? (And this “renaming views” thing is just one example. Every part of the product changed while I was working on it. There wasn’t a single part of the product that didn’t radically change while I was recording my videos.)

They feel like they have no obligation to keep us in the loop, yet we are the evangelists of their product. They have no idea that they are destroying goodwill, at least with me they are.

And, as always, the thing that frustrates me the most is that they make arbitrary changes like this which HURT our productivity & workflow, while actively ignoring REAL ISSUES in the product — things like cutting off text everywhere throughout the system (including just trying to see a date/time field in an expanded linked record), or not being able to import CSV files into RTF fields, or not being able to display any other field except the primary field on the calendar, or no non-US currency options, or any of the hundreds of other things that are frustrating real people in the real world.

It’s called having a DIALOGUE with your users. I guarantee you that I’ve come from 30 years of working with a database company (FileMaker) where DIALOGUE is the most important thing to them. And I can tell you that it is ABSENT with Airtable.

When are the users allowed to have a voice? Or, at the very least, be kept in the loop? Maybe let us know that you’re listening to us?

Yeah, I get it. They have ZERO OBLIGATION TO US. But it certainly doesn’t generate any goodwill. Do they want to generate goodwill with their users or not?

It’s getting to the point where I’m so incredibly frustrated with Airtable, that I might just go back to full-time FileMaker development again. FileMaker development is much more lucrative, and as a developer, I actually feel valued.

For me its less a problem that “Airtable hasn’t added x,y, z yet”, its “Airtable won’t give any indication if they would even consider x or y or z”. This is why I like ClickUp’s use of canny.io to give users simple feedback on “we’re considering it/ we’re working on it/we’ve released it” in addition to a community support forums for “how do i …?” questions instead of product suggestions/bugs (link below).

Yes, I see lots of companies using canny.io these days, and it seems really great. What is this ClickUp product? It looks very promising. Could it be used as a replacement for Airtable?

@Taylor_Savage @Jason @Adam_Minich @Katherine_Duh @Aron @Linjie_Ding

[Justin_Barrett]

ScottWorld:

This is such a great point, and this has been my biggest frustration as well — ZERO COMMUNICATION with their users. We have no idea what is coming, and then they suddenly change everything on us overnight.

“Zero communication” is not true. If it were true, we wouldn’t have had the numerous notices that certain features were available for public beta testing. I’ve been part of several such betas just this year, and it’s all because Airtable put the word out—sometimes publicly, sometimes privately—that new things were in the works. Bottom line: Airtable does communicate with its users about what’s coming, but clearly not as frequently as many of us would prefer.

[ScottWorld]

You are, of course, totally correct here. It’s not ZERO communication. It just feels like it. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

It’s not even the “frequency” of communication that’s the problem. I feel like it’s the “inconsistent communication” which is the problem. It’s almost like they feel that some changes don’t need to be shared with us at all, even though those changes have a major impact on how we do things. (All the while ignoring small things that we’ve been begging to be changed.)

Other software companies have “partner programs” to keep their consultants/developers/evangelists/power-users in the loop, but as far as I know, Airtable has no such program.

I think that the people in this thread would be the PERFECT group of people to be invited into such a program, especially since many of us are consulting multiple companies on their Airtable deployments in their organizations.

The thing I still can’t wrap my head around is this:

• Why do they spend so much time changing things that were working fine, while not changing things that actually need attention?

[Kamille_Parks]

ScottWorld:

Why do they spend so much time changing things that were working fine, while not changing things that actually need attention?

I’m not a software developer but I can’t imagine there is a single development team at Airtable. If I were to hazard a guess, the folks tweaking main app stuff (like adding/editing fields) are not the same folks building the custom apps platform and are not the same folks working on security.

Just saying, we don’t seem to complain when they add stuff we didn’t ask for if we end up liking it lol. “I didn;t ask for this!” Is not as compelling as “this doesn’t work as well as it should”.

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

Airtable has no such program.

Correct; been asking for such a program since mid-2019.

[Kamille_Parks]

Bill.French:

Correct; been asking for such a program since mid-2019.

Correction: They likely have no formal developer-partner program, OR they have one and none of us are in it. I know certain developers have fore-knowledge of certain features sometimes (I’m being intentionally vague), and I know I got multiple betas ahead of most, but I know I did not get them first.

[ScottWorld]

Kamille_Parks:

Just saying, we don’t seem to complain when they add stuff we didn’t ask for if we end up liking it lol. “I didn;t ask for this!” Is not as compelling as “this doesn’t work as well as it should”.

Lol, that’s true! Airtable Syncing was one of those pleasant surprises! Same with automations!

[Bill_French]

Kamille_Parks:

Correction: They likely have no formal developer-partner program

Umm, if there is a formal developer partner program there would surely be evidence of it somewhere, otherwise, it would be an informal program. By definition, any programs that may exist have certainly not been formerly revealed, ergo, they are secret and unable to be joined by request or application submitted to join.

Unless someone has a link to a dev partner program, I’m correcting your correction. :slightly_smiling_face: