Look and feel of a universe base (without publishing)

[Manasvi_Somaiya]

Some of the AirTable universe bases that I see as examples/templates have cover pages as well as left-hand navigation for the different views (as opposed to seeing it via a dropdown). I was wondering if it’s possible to have your internal base have a look and feel similar to that. I can imagine that this would be very useful for collaboration, especially in cases I want to share bases that will be used by different groups of people who are unaware that the drop-down is the way to find the different views. Anyone manage to solve this problem?

[Brad_Johns]

Thanks for the ‘Universe’ tip, I hadn’t seen that yet and agreed, to your point. The Universe sidebar format is awesome (kudos to the AT team!) I would definitely love to see some version of it inside the application!

I could see it as a way to help me curate information amongst my team as it sprawls. Currently I use an internal website with base view links for specific information rather than exposing a whole base with 20+ tables etc. and confusing the heck out of my crew. It works, but it is a bit of extra work.

[Andrew_Enright]

+10 @Brad_Johns.

We too need a better UI for management of team views/view-links, particularly in the absence of user-specific views and/or the ability to lock particular views without relying on user-permissions.

Whether in a drop-down (as-is) or sidebar (which would be NICE for anyone with a lot of views, especially if they are already Slack/Asana users) we’d need view-nesting, AKA “folders”. One long list, even if named carefully, is unwieldy.

All that aside, is there a way to leverage Universe without making our work public? Haven’t had a sec to really poke at it myself… THX!

[Noel_Howell]

Hi! I saw this view in the https://www.airtable.com/universe site from the blog post you sent about Singularity Hub.

I was hoping that this ‘sidebar view’ was actually something that could be available to me on my bases? It would make navigation for my users SO much easier than tabs across the top and dropdowns to access different views.

Is this a setting?

Thanks!

[Y_K]

You could build your own (I’m sure it’s not a built-in feature):

In your base, share the views via embedded code (read-only). Build a page with 2 frames, the left frame is the menu and the right frame contains the embedded HTML code.

[Toynk_Accountin]

The bases in Airtable Universe have a left navigation pane for tables and views rather than the traditional tabbed view. Can the left navigation pane be enabled in any base? I tried copying a base from Airtable Universe and the navigation pain was gone in the copied version. Thanks!

[Gruff_Vaughan]

I immediately thought the exact same thing as soon as I was introduced to the Universe layout. Having this sidebar available to select views would be extremely useful for my team! :rocket:

[Andy_Lin1]

My own solution to this was to simply use browser bookmarks. (Firefox’s sidebar works well for this; Chrome users will need an extension to get a similar layout.) About as sophisticated as duct tape, I’ll admit, but it works!

[Robert_Hyndes]

This would be a great feature so much more user friendly

[Kevin_Conklin]

I see it in the preview, but when I download the base and open it there is no sidebar navigation.

[Jesper_Henrikse]

YEs! this would really be great! Hope to hear from the Airtable team later today ( 12.february 2018) . I have asked them if this is possible.
It would be a very simple thing to built for them but be a huge … YUUUGE! feature for users.