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Improved Find / Search

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Arlo_Haskell
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

The โ€œfind in viewโ€ feature could be a lot better. Here are the problems I see:

Search text obscures field names: when you click the magnifying glass or type โŒ˜+F, the text-entry window covers up the field names. You canโ€™t tell what field youโ€™re looking at unless you scroll left/right to get around the search window.

Search only returns โ€œperfect matchโ€ results: If I search for โ€œJohn Doeโ€ I also want to see results for โ€œJohn S. Doe,โ€ โ€œJohn Q. Doeโ€ and โ€œDr. John Doe.โ€ As it is, these variants are outside of my search results. Unless I know their middle initials or titles and know that they were entered into Airtable with those variants, I have to search for โ€œDoeโ€ and look through every single Tom, Dick, and Harry โ€œDoeโ€ to find the John I want.

Search is limited to a single field: Similar to the above, I want to find a 2016 transaction made by Jane Smith, but if I search for โ€œJane Smith 2016โ€ no results are found.

Search results should be more like filter results: My people table has 5,000+ contacts and three different formula fields that incorporate their name. So if I search for โ€œJohnโ€, I find a lot of Johns distributed throughout my base and have to click through โ€œJohnโ€ three times in each record until finding the one I want. I often end up creating a filter just for the purposes of finding a single record. Itโ€™s beautiful the way a filter eliminates everything youโ€™re not looking for and collapses all the โ€œJohnsโ€ into an easy-to-scan group of records. But itโ€™s time-consuming to create a custom filter for the purposes of locating a single record. Couldnโ€™t search work more like the filter?

Anyway, those are my observations/suggestions. Overall I think Airtable is terrific and I love seeing it get better and better.

1 Comment
Claude_Schneide
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

+1 for improving search, to behave more like filters.

The biggest issue we have is that the Search functionality is really weak, for such a powerful tool. It just highlights matching rows in the grid view, and you have to click to view each matching result in turn.

What weโ€™d love is for the Search to act as a global filter - i.e. hide all rows that donโ€™t contain the search term.

Weโ€™re trying Airtable for project management, and sometimes will have a key term in the task title, sometimes in the notes, and sometimes in the comments/discussion. We thus canโ€™t create a filter that searches all of these fields (or any field overall) for records matching a search term.

Use case: we want to quickly find if we have any existing records for a bug/task. Having to click through one row at a time is much slower than skimming a short list of results.

Iโ€™m aware of the Search Block, but:
a) itโ€™s only available on the $20/user/month plan, not even the $10 plan (which BTW should have more features to compete with Asana/Wrike etc)
b) it shows results in a different/limited popup view compared to the normal grid/kanban view, which isnโ€™t easy to work with