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I’m lovin’ Airtable, but, in grid view, I’m not thrilled with those little icons that appear beside very field name to indicate what type of field it is. Most are text fields, so it looks as if I have fields named “A First Name” and “A City”. I’d like a configuration switch to switch them off.
Airtable support is reminding me of Evernote support. Which isn’t good. There are things at Evernote that hundreds of customers want, with no opposition, that have been asked for for years and years, and yet never get implemented, or even acknowledged.
I see that this request–the ability to hide field type icons–is now four years old. I can see no reason whatsoever that this great idea is not implemented. There is no opposition. Obviously a dev is in love with the prettiness of his or her brilliant idea, and it’s not going to be taken away.
Others here have rightly said that the icons are distracting. And in my case, it’s just making the field widths too wide for my single character fields. Like Y/N, a number from 1 to 10, etc. I want these fields as narrow as possible, but when I reduce their width the titles go away and I’m left with only the stupid icon showing. And of course I just can’t even get the width narrow enough anyway, titles aside. I’ve got a base that has a few dozen of these fields and it’s so spread out in width that it’s a pain in the butt to use. Makes me consider moving it over to Google Sheets.
I’ve noticed this type of lack of awareness by Airtable support on other issues. It’s absurd. I guess Airtable is going to suffer the same outcome as Evernote eventually. A has been company, watching others improve their products.
I prefer them the way they are, not knowing field types can really slow down workflows, particularly when people can’t understand why they can’t add data for formula or lookup fields.
Having options to tweak every little thing makes for a confusing ui - even the very small amount of configuration options available now confuses some of my users.
I, too, find these icons very annoying. Why does the Airtable support team refuse to fix this problem? Is there a reason? If so, why doesn't anyone tell us what it is?
As an excited new Airtable user, I am super disappointed to come across this problem in Airtable and to now come to this thread to find out that it has been totally ignored by Airtable for 6 years!
I guess Airtable is not as cool as I initially thought. Too bad. Probably have to move on to something else. 😞
As a new Airtable user this is something that immediately stood out to me. It's absurd because they could easily have the icon appear when you hover over the header cell instead. Or not. Either way, have the option there and allow the user to remove the field type icon if they want to. It is such a basic idea with screen space being the most valued commodity on a spreadsheet, we shouldn't have to put up with this. Shame
