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:

[Kamille_Parks]

@Bill.French Objection sustained.

So now about my theory of an Airtable Illuminati…

[ScottWorld]

Kamille_Parks:

So now about my theory of an Airtable Illuminati…

LOL, I think that @Kamille_Parks knows more than she is letting on… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

[Kamille_Parks]

Man they don’t tell me anything, which is the thing I most often complain about.

[ScottWorld]

Lol!! Same with me!! :joy:

Well, as far as I’m concerned, we ARE the Airtable illuminati!! :winking_face:

p.s. I know that I mentioned this above, but I’m so incredibly frustrated that I can’t customize fields on my iPad anymore. When Airtable makes random changes that negatively affect users, it becomes a real problem. But what makes it even more egregious is that these features were working 100% perfectly fine in the past! Focus on things that aren’t working properly.

[Bill_French]

Kamille_Parks:

they don’t tell me anything, which is the thing I most often complain about.

And there it is - informal, need-to-know, intermittent, woeful discontinuities when communicating roadmap, beta, already reported bugs, etc. This is @ScottWorld’s fundamental assertion which would be easily remedied the way vastly most SaaS platforms do so.

[Kamille_Parks]

My third reply in this thread called for a roadmap by-way-of Canny, and pointed out no one would have been (as) angry had they gotten a heads-up. The main consensus I see in this thread is “Airtable should publicize some type of product roadmap”.

Just now seeing the rest of your question, @ScottWorld. Clickup is a project management webapp with a pretty generous free version. It works better than Airtable for project management since that’s what its designed to do, but that is the only thing its designed to do.

[ScottWorld]

OMG.

This new customize field functionality is EVEN MORE INSANE than any of us have mentioned before. Here’s the 3rd thing which I didn’t even realize above:

3. Now when you create a new field, are you ready for this? Sit down for this one. The ABSOLUTE GENIUSES at Airtable have decided that we don’t need to see any of the options for the fields that we create. Whenever you create a new field, it doesn’t show you any of the options for that field. It literally just creates the field. So if you want to make ANY changes to the field options at all (even as simple as adding the “time” to a date field, or changing the options for a “last modified time” field, or ANY OPTIONS AT ALL ), you have to create the field once, then you have to GO BACK INTO THE CUSTOMIZE FIELD OPTION AGAIN to find the options and change the options. Oh, and then, you have to take a 3rd action to RENAME THE FIELD. So now, creating a field & choosing its options now takes 3 DISTINCT STEPS that are extremely confusing for the user (especially if the user doesn’t even know that there are options available): 1) create the field, 2) rename the field, 3) go back into the field customization and choose its options. What ever happened to keeping things easy & understandable & simple & straightforward for the user? The craziest thing of all is that the user DOESN’T EVEN KNOW THAT FIELD OPTIONS ARE AVAILABLE ANYMORE. And for those that do, it takes MULTIPLE STEPS TO GET TO THOSE FIELD OPTIONS.

This is definitive proof to me that there is no adult supervision at Airtable. This is what happens when you put a bunch of millennials in a room and give them hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding, and don’t give them a project manager, and give all the engineers free reign to do whatever they want with the product. They run their product like a fraternity party.

THIS. IS. INFURIATING.

I’m currently considering completely walking away from Airtable at this point. I’m this close to pulling it down off of my website as a service that I provide, and I’m this close to no longer offering Airtable consulting or development anymore.

@Adam_Minich @Taylor_Savage @Aron @Katherine_Duh @Linjie_Ding @Jason @Michelle_Valentine @Stephen_Suen @Nicole_Hicks @Zoe_Bridges

[ScottWorld]

It’s not even that they could so easily make such a destructive decision like this. It’s that it happens so often, and that it shows how little foresight or adult supervision there is at the company.

[Kamille_Parks]

ScottWorld:

which I didn’t even realize above

You didn’t realize it because that changed sometime between earlier today and roughly now. I’m not going to hop onboard your absurd Millennials-based conclusion train, but yes this is a bad change as well and in my view the worst change of the “series”.

As I said before, I liked the changed process of setting up settings before the field was officially created. This is worse.

[ScottWorld]

Kamille_Parks:

You didn’t realize it because that changed sometime between earlier today and roughly now

Oh, wow! So they’ve actively made this decision even worse. :joy: :man_facepalming:

Thanks for pointing that out — that explains how I missed it earlier.

I am just infuriated.