Requests for more granular access permissions have been beaten to death, but I recently shared this detailed use case/request with a member of Airtable support, so I’d like to post it here, as well – both for reference and to learn whether or not the community has discovered workarounds. USE CASE As a short-term vacation rental company, our primary AirTable Base stores the following types of data: PROPERTIES (Table 1) Property Detail (address, footage, etc.) RENTALS (Table 2) Rental Terms Net Sales Net Profits Sales Team Member Commissions AirTable Admin Formula Fields As for our company structure, we’re made up of multiple departments (like most companies). Each department demands specific levels of access to certain types of data (also, like most companies). For example, here are 2 departments and the level of access they each require to the data types listed above: SALES TEAM EDIT: Property Detail COMMENT: Rental Terms VIEW: Net Sales NO ACCESS: Net Profits, Sales Commissions, AirTable Admin Formula Fields RENTAL TEAM EDIT: Rental Terms COMMENT: Property Detail NO ACCESS: Net Sales, Net Profits, Sales Commissions, AirTable Admin Formula Fields PROBLEM You may notice a similarity between the needs of the Sales Team and Rental Team: both sets of users require at least 2 permission types for data stored within the same Table. The current Airtable permission settings do not allow us to mimic this access structure. We need granular access permission sets that can be applied “per user, per view”, as opposed to the current “per user, per base”. We’re not so much interested in restricting access to the records of our base, but more interested in restricting access to the columns/fields, and limiting which users can read and/or edit the content within these fields. It’s not enough to blanket each staff member with the binary option of “READ Everything inside the Base” or “EDIT Everything inside the Base”. There are too many nuances in between. At the same time, “per user, per view” permissions are complicated to maintain, and perhaps too granular. Which leads me to my proposed compromise… PATHS TO A SOLUTION Certainly this is far easier said than done, but the most holistic, usable, and obvious solution (imo) would result from the addition of: TEAMS defined as groups of users who share identical access permissions for the data stored within a given Base any given Team is unique to a single Base (i.e. the Base A “sales team” may be different than the Base B “sales team”) all users must be on 1, and only 1, Team TEAM VIEWS users with EDIT permissions are now limited to creating (a) Personal Views or (b) Team Views if a user creates a Team View, the access permissions for the new View will default to “VIEW” for all users on their Team, and “HIDDEN” for all other Teams (the Base Creator can later extend access to this View via the Team Panel). thus, by definition, Team Views are Views which are HIDDEN from all but 1 Team when sharing Team Views, login is required to access the share link (ensuring that users from other Teams cannot access); public share links are not allowed TEAM ADMIN PANEL accessed only by Base “Creators”, each Base has one “Team Panel” interface, but the settings within the panel will change respective of the “Team” that is selected from a Team dropdown (located within the panel) the Team Panel lists all Views that exist within the base (regardless of which Team is selected), grouped by Table (see attached images) adjacent to each View name is an access permission dropdown, which “Creators” use to assign the following access permissions to the selected Team: EDIT, VIEW, COMMENT, HIDDEN To illustrate, here’s a very crude rendering of the Team Admin Panel: ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS Since Views are merely groupings of “Fields”, these additions would ultimately allow a clever Base Creator to assign granular permissions on a “per user, per field” level, if they so choose. Consider a single user, John, who has the following access: VIEW access to View A EDIT access to View B These permissions are better thought of like so: VIEW access to all Fields of View A EDIT access to all Fields of View B Since John’s highest level of access is EDIT, he can add new Personal or Team View to the Base. If John were to create View C, he would have all Fields of View A and View B at his disposal in creating his new View C, but his ability to EDIT field data will be limited to the Fields of View B. ... View more

The tag line for your product is “looks like a spreadsheet, acts like a database”. That being the case, please consider that many people/companies will in fact want to replace most of their spreadsheet use with it! Which in turn expands your marketplace exponentially. BUT, in order to do that, you need to give us a folder hierarchy with simple detail views to manage the hundreds or thousands of bases we will have. Right now the huge icons in list view are IMHO rather silly if you want companies of any size (who will quickly have hundreds or thousands of bases) to be using this. Thanks for considering. ... View more

Please add an OCR engine for images and files along WITH ability to search text of attachments. Normal search engine should be able to find text in files such as *.xls, *.doc, *.txt evernote like OCR engine should be similar to evernote’s. evernote like OCR engine should be able to search through image and PDF attachments User should be able to UPLOAD/CREATE files that can be OCR’d by one (or both) of these methods: the ability to upload multiple images to one record and have every image in that record OCR’ed. Said upload should be able to be done from both a camera and a file picker. the ability to upload multiple images into a single file (ie create a pdf or something similar). Said upload should be able to be done from both the camera and from a file picker. Said pdf-like-file should be able to be searched with the evernote like OCR engine. Use cases: Airtable would make an AMAZING receipt scanner app IF it had an OCR engine like evernote. Also, it would make a great document storage app that would beat google drives capabilities if it would be able to OCR pdf files with an engine like evernotes. would also fill void of why some people use Adobe Acrobat on android- to store / create docs that they can reference later for legal purposes. Use cases from other users on airtable: Text and table formatting one might keep a database of excerpts from academic papers, and link relevant things in their project to those excerpts. Or say someone OCR’d a bunch of documents (contracts, receipts, whatever). They can upload the picture version, sure, but it’s not searchable, Barcode/QR support in Mobile app(s) In addition to barcode and QR, would you ever consider OCR? I’d love to use Airtable to take stock of the 500 cars I have in my dealership, and if the camera scanner had OCR built in as well as barcodes and QR, I’d be able to zap in the license plates. One More Note About the OCR Engine The reason I keep mentioning evernotes OCR engine is because it doesn’t make singular judgments about how to covert an image into text…instead it takes the user’s search string and finds any portion of an images that could match the search criteria (within a certain % of confidence). This is perfect for receipts and pictures taken with a camera where the image capture environment is not very well controlled. ... View more

In scripting block, when calling input.textAsync("Your Name") it would be convenient to have an optional second argument to provide a default value in the text field: input.textAsync("Your Name", "Jane Doe") ... View more

When I share an Airtable, I don’t want to put every information visible in the card but also I don’t to show every field in the expanded record. It would be great to have a middle ground where I could sensitive hide fields in the expanded record. Please consider having this possibility as our use case for Airtable is lost without this feature. Thank you ... View more

I am really afraid of someone deleting my base. It would be great if bases could be password protected or backed up somewhere else. ... View more

I’ve created a bar chart with stacked data and I’m looking for a way to add the total to the top of each bar. Seems like this would be a basic function but Airtable Support has informed me that this is not available. Has anybody else run into this issue and found a work-around solution? Thanks! ... View more

There is already this feature request (forum URL plus “/t/request-entity-relationship-diagram/2490”) that asks for a visual representation of the different elements in a base, which would be great BUT also… I’m trying to ditch my LucidChart subscription so that I can use Airtable for everything, but right now the ability to create ERDs (for content models for content strategy) is the one thing I still need LucidChart (or Visio) for. My job requires very large (e.g. 500k+ pages) site migrations, so not having visual representation of relationships between content types can make projects very difficult for everyone across our team to reason about. I could see having something like “cardinality” or the more colloquial “crow’s foot notation” in column B to show the relationships between the content types listed in columns A and C. The visual presentation could come up in a block on the right-side panel. This is different from the above request, which shows the actual relationships between rows/items added to AirTable, whereas I want to be able to arbitrarily create this visualization and house it within a base with all my other project assets. ... View more

What is the proposed idea/solution? Please add an option for expand from just # of days selection in the automation trigger timeframe, but hours as well. This would make it easy to overrride all automatic (but delayed 1 day) emails from being sent out by Airtable at midnight GMT. How does is solve the user problems? Not ideal in most businesses for automatic (but delayed one day) emails to go out at midnight GMT. We want automatic emails to seem generated by a real person in real-time, not adversely sent too early in the morning and by a automatic system. How was this validated? ... Who is the target audience? Any business that sends automated emails to clients/customers! ... View more