Petition for the attention of the (wonderful) Airtable Product Team - Please decouple the Add Field and Add Record buttons from a Table 🙏

[andywingrave]

Hey there,

I want to first off note that I don’t want this to sound like a complaint. :pray:

I love Airtable, and I have used it now for 3 years across countless large organisations and medium-sized clients.

I use it for everything I do. But there was always one part of the UX that I always saw stressing users out, and that was the way you can just click and accidentally add a brand new record at the bottom without ever meaning to. The process to create a record was so easy it was overwhelming, because to non-experienced, pressing command + z is often not learned, so they’d see Airtable as a place where it wasn’t safe to click anywhere (A problem later solved, in part for teams, by restricting people’s ability to add records in a base, or just using a sync so nobody can create records), and let’s not even talk about creating a record which is part of a filtered view because that’s just madness squared … But when teaching Airtable, all I’ve ever heard for 3 years now is a lot of “Whoops”…“Didn’t mean to do that”…“Whoops, where did that go?”, “Whoops, how do I?”/… etc etc etc

And even to experienced users, the daily mini-frustrations I, myself, have when accidentally creating a record and having to command + z was one thing I was sure that Airtable would fix sooner or later, so I didn’t let it bug me, and went on my merry way… Loving pretty much everything else about Airtable, creating thousands of accidental records along the way…“Whoops, command+z”

Then August 2020 hit, and they let a team mess around with the record creation flow, causing mayhem among my clients, and colleagues alike, creating, what I think is one of the longest threads on this community yet.

We all had a little moan, a little joke, and I think for the most part they changed the functionality back - even though, it’s still, in my opinion, clunkier than it was before it was messed with.

But then something happened about a month back… Whereby Airtable have given the field creation process the record treatment and made all sides of their app complete and utter minefields. So today, as I created my 10th accidental field of the day, I decided to write a polite petition to ask the UX designer and Product team…nay, BEG them to fix this!

Here’s my suggestion as an alternative:

1. Keep the Plus signs. They’re nice and clear. Everyone is happy :green_circle:
2. Please for the love of god stop messing with this empty space - This is important space that doesn’t need to be clickable 🔴

and …

3. If you really, REALLY have to…Why not add a little friendly round button that a user can click on, so that we can all be very comfortable that this behaviour was intentional :large_blue_circle:

It feels like this decision was made to increase field creation, which just seems mad to me. I typically want less fields…Not more! This is the graph of user frustration that I imagine the analytics doesn’t show:

Please say it’s not just me :cry:

As a side note, I’ve actually been building my bases in Google Sheets recently, and my stress levels have been decreasing as a consequence, but it still feels a little like this

And as another side note…Airtable Product team - Sorry for the rant. I rant because I care :crazy_face: … You all rock :metal: !

[Bill_French]

ScottWorld:

I totally agree 1,000%. That’s 10 times more than 100%!

Ironically, with Airtable’s floating point issues, it’s really like 1,000.000000000000000000011%

[ScottWorld]

Bill.French:

Ironically, with Airtable’s floating point issues, it’s really like 1,000.000000000000000000011%

Lol!

Here’s why Airtable’s claims of trying to help new users don’t really hold up to scrutiny:

1. They claim that this new “Add A New Field” functionality was designed specifically to help new users.

2. And yet, there is no easy way for new users to “Add A New Record” in a grid with lots of ungrouped records.

When you have a grid that is filled with ungrouped records, there is no easy access to any visible “plus sign” to create new records at the bottom of the grid. Not even a floating “plus sign” on the grid view (except under odd circumstances). New users are consistently scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to add new records into their system.

Yes, you can right-click in a record to create a new record in the middle of your grid, or you can scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen to create a new record at the bottom of the grid, but that’s not very helpful for new users who are expecting an always-present plus sign to create new records.

I challenge anybody to name any software product on the market that doesn’t have an always-present plus sign to create new records. Usually, this plus sign is in a toolbar at the TOP of the screen.

Ironically, the always-present plus sign in Airtable is the “Add A New Field” plus sign, which is why it was so unnecessary to make the entire screen clickable to add a new field.

Keep in mind that adding new records happens hundreds of times per day, whereas adding new fields happens rarely.

In other words, for new users:

1. Airtable has made it hard to create new records — an activity which takes place hundreds of times per day.

2. But Airtable has made it easy to accidentally create new fields — an activity which happens rarely.

Also, keep in mind:

1. Creating new fields was always 100% easy in the past. The plus sign in the column headers for “adding a new field” is always visible — it is always accessible at all times. But now it has gotten so ridiculously easy that people are accidentally bringing up an accidental dialog box dozens of times per day.

2. Creating new records was always difficult in the past. The button for adding a new record is almost always hidden, under most common circumstances. And yet this functionality still remains difficult to this day.

I would love for @Christy_Roach or @Jason or @Linjie_Ding or @Taylor_Savage or @Adam_Minich or @Stephen_Suen or @Zoe_Bridges or someone from product engineering to explain the logic behind this.

If the goal is to “help new users”, then I’d love to know the answer to these 2 questions:

1. Why is creating records so difficult for new users? An activity which they perform all day long, every day?

2. How is accidentally bringing up a “new field” dialog box dozens of times per day helping new users? An activity which should typically be SHIELDED from new users?

I’d love to be enlightened on how any of this is helping new users.

[Christy_Roach]

Hi all,

I know it’s been a while since we chimed in on this thread, and recognize that the lack of Airtable response here felt frustrating. On our end, it felt important to make sure we aligned internally, debated our options, and reported back with news for this group, rather than giving a half-formed answer while things were still moving internally. While we do want to make sure we help new users get data into Airtable, we wanted to do another round of ideation and internal dogfooding to see if we could find a solution that would alleviate some of the frustration voiced in this thread.

After digging through your feedback and doing some analysis around our new user behavior, I’m happy to report that we’re making some changes that I think you’ll be excited about.

Here’s a quick summary of the changes we’ll be making:

Entirely remove the ghost column: Clicking on the area to the right of your last column will no longer create a new column. Based on our team’s analysis and testing, we found that the column create button that exists in the column header is large enough that a new user can find it and understand how to create a new column. While we expect we will see a dip in fields created, it will be worth that dip to reduce the frustration of accidentally creating a new column.
Tweaks to the ghost row interaction: Unlike the column change, we saw that if we eliminated this pattern altogether, it would meaningfully reduce the records that are added to Airtable. That said, we have made changes to this pattern to help reduce accidental record creation. Now, if you have a cell in the grid view selected, clicking the ghost row will deselect the cell, rather than immediately adding a new row. If you click the ghost row when a cell isn’t selected, it will add a row. In digging into this usage pattern, we saw that too many users rely on this behavior for us to remove it completely, and the “row add” button that exists is too small for us to feel confident that new users will discover it on its own.

We’ve just pushed these updates live, and you should start seeing the changes in your Airtable workspace in the next 20-30 minutes. We know that there are tradeoffs for the changes around ghost rows, but hope this change is a good middle ground between the easy row creation we’re looking for from new users, and the frustrations you’ve voiced around accidental row creation.

I’m feeling hopeful that we’ll be able to strike a balance between our internal goals and metrics and the requests and feedback that are voiced here. More often than not, those goals and priorities should align nicely. But, when we run into situations like this, my hope is that we’ll be able to debate and discuss with one another, even when we disagree.

I also recognize that much of the feedback and frustration voiced in this thread goes beyond row and column creation, including feature updates for areas like calendars, apps, automations, and more, as well as how our team interacts and acts on feedback from the Community. Those areas will be an ongoing conversation and I hope we’ll be able to improve the Airtable product and how our Community program works, with your help.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

[Databaser]

Christy_Roach:

I know it’s been a while since we chimed in on this thread, and recognize that the lack of Airtable response here felt frustrating.

Christy_Roach:

I also recognize that much of the feedback and frustration voiced in this thread goes beyond row and column creation […] as well as how our team interacts and acts on feedback from the Community.

I found that the difference in level of help, listening and feedback on what the Airtable team is working on, eg just checking things out internally (which is perfectly fine by the way), via support@airtable.com in comparison with this community here is huge. It’s not because you’re aligning things internally, that you can’t communicate anything. So I’m glad there’s at least an intention of improving this and I for one am really looking forward to this.

And :raised_hands: for the changes!

[kuovonne]

Thank you so much for reporting back to this thread on what happened with this issue. I totally understand that it is hard to decide how much of internal processes to share with the community.

Thank you also for the changes. I applaud Airtable’s choices. Airtable has some great UX/UI designers who are able to come up with beautiful, working designs that are not always apparent when people first consider an issue.

I appreciate that you and Airtable are open to debating and discussing issues, even when we disagree.

I am especially pleased that this discussion not only improved the immediate trigger for the thread (ghost columns), it also improved a long standing issue (ghost rows).

Part of the issue is that the community doesn’t really know what Airtable is ready to discuss. The community also doesn’t know what would be a simple change for Airtable. When new UI changes have big impacts to how we use Airtable, community members are quick to voice their displeasure. In recent history, I can think of three issues where this happened.

• views sidebar
• new field configuration / naming screens
• creation of new fields

However, there are other issues (like the ghost rows bar) that bother users and could be improved, but don’t end up as hot topics on the forums. New users post product suggestions, which tend to get ignored. Establish users are resigned to the current design and have their workarounds.

For example, here are a few user interface tweaks that have multiple product suggestions but didn’t end up as run-away topics on the forums.

• Collapsing the “Create a view” list to show more views in the view sidebar, especially on small screens
• Wrapping long names for tables, views, and fields
• Being able to expand the box for writing a formula to type multi-line formulas right in the box

Here are a few personal UXUI tweaks that I would like to see

• When hiding/rearranging fields, being able to search by field type
• When rearranging fields in the drop-down, being able to hide hidden fields, to make rearranging visible fields easier
• Better sizing on the configuration screen for rollup fields
• When converting between lookup and rollup field types, remembering the linked record field and the field in the other table

[ScottWorld]

@Christy_Roach

Wow! First of all, thank you. I am super impressed that you followed up with all of us! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: That has ALMOST NEVER happened before on these forums, so this is quite possibly a sign that things are changing for the better at Airtable! I’m remaining “cautiously optimistic” that this is an indication of brighter days ahead of us. :star2: :slightly_smiling_face:

Second of all, these new changes are absolutely brilliant and perfect!! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: :raised_hands: So again, one more round of BIG THANKS!! :cowboy_hat_face: :horse_racing:

Thank you for listening to what we had to say, and for fixing the “New Column” behavior. This really means a lot to have you guys take our concerns seriously, and take positive action on our concerns.

Even better than that:

The way that you guys fixed the “New Row” behavior is absolutely 100% perfect!! :heart_eyes: Previously, I didn’t even want to get into talking about how annoying the “New Row” behavior was, because I know that it was so useful for so many people — but now you guys have NAILED the perfect solution!!

Now this works absolutely perfectly! If your cursor is already in a field, clicking the “phantom row” will just clear your cursor instead of creating a new field. This is so amazing and so brilliant and the perfect solution, and will save me (and everyone across the world) from accidentally creating new records all day long!

It’s funny, because while all of us were complaining about the brand new “new column” behavior, it was really the age old “new row” behavior which has been causing endless problems for everyone for years. And now, that has been fixed as a result of this discussion! Thank you! Such a big sigh of relief. Absolutely 100% perfect. :relieved:

---

And while we have your attention, perhaps I could bring up a couple of other topics that have been on my mind:

• These changes that you just made for us really highlights the type of incredible results & incredible improvements & incredible benefits that can come from genuine communication between the Airtable team & your users. In fact, you have an amazing group of Airtable consultants & Airtable power users right here on the forums, who provide about 90% of the answers on these forums & who service hundreds of clients who use Airtable. We are here to help Airtable improve & become the best that it can be, so that our clients continue to stick with Airtable and that our consulting businesses continue to thrive — which then helps Airtable continue to thrive! And also, we genuinely love Airtable. When our clients leave Airtable in frustration or anger, it hurts us both emotionally & financially. And it hurts Airtable as well.

• On that note, I think it would be a great idea for Airtable to form some sort of an “inner circle” or “brain trust” with your top consultants & top power users, and have regular monthly Zoom calls with us to discuss product development feedback. For us Airtable consultants, our ears are on the ground every day, hearing what our clients love & hate about Airtable — and we are standing right there when customers abandon Airtable & never look back. Airtable isn’t noticing the people who are leaving Airtable, because Airtable is only focusing on the big enterprise clients. Airtable is filling its bucket with lots of water, but it isn’t noticing the hole at the bottom of the bucket that is leaking water. Meanwhile, your top Airtable consultants like myself are in the field, seeing the water dripping out of the bottom of the bucket, and we can tell you precisely why. Personally, I have been in the database business for 36 years, and my other database language is FileMaker. They have monthly calls with their developers every month to get our feedback and discuss their product roadmap with us. I think that it would be extremely valuable for Airtable to do the same thing — it would be valuable for Airtable, it would be valuable for your consultants, and it would be valuable for your customers.

---

In the meantime, here are 18 issues in Airtable which seem relatively easy to fix, and would greatly improve the platform. People have been complaining about many of these issues for years, and for a few of them, I have personally lost clients who have left the Airtable platform altogether because of these issues:

1. Number & currency fields: These fields only allow formatting for USA & Canada. 80% of the world uses a different number & currency formatting than us, including most of Europe. This seems like such an easy fix. I have lost European clients due to this issue.

2. Calendar view & calendar popup menu in date fields: Calendars in over 75% of the world start their weeks on Mondays or Saturdays instead of Sunday. Most of Europe starts their weeks on Mondays. Airtable only displays calendars that start on Sunday. I have lost European clients due to this issue.

3. Mobile embedded view: I have lost clients due to this issue. The majority of Internet traffic takes place on mobile devices — this is a well-known statistic — and yet Airtable’s mobile embedded view doesn’t have a toolbar. So people using an Airtable mobile embedded view don’t have the ability to sort/filter/search/group their records. The toolbar is there on a desktop embedded view, but it’s not there on a mobile embedded view. I lost a massively lucrative client last month because of this issue, and Airtable has permanently lost this client as well. He was actually selling information to clients who would have then signed up for their own Airtable accounts themselves to receive his information, but he has now left Airtable & switched to another platform. Airtable doesn’t realize how lucrative this client could have been for them, but he wasn’t an enterprise client so they didn’t notice. People have also been complaining about this issue in the forums for years.

4. Unfortunately, this one is probably the biggest user experience problem in the platform right now, and it’s a brand new problem that you guys just rolled out recently. This is a really negative problem that has to do with field creation, and it has been driving me (and others) absolutely insane. Unfortunately, this is such a huge problem that it is possibly worse than the “phantom column” issue that started this entire thread to begin with.

   Please let me know if you need me to create a video of this problem:

   Now, when you go to create a new field, the field type changes based on WHEREVER YOUR MOUSE WAS LAST HOVERING. So if you right click on a column header and then choose “Insert Right” or “Insert Left”, when the new field is created, it chooses the field type of wherever your mouse is currently hovering. And then, if you move your mouse away from the drop down list, Airtable REMEMBERS THE FIELD TYPE from wherever your mouse was last hovering. In other words, instead of using your mouse to CLICK ON A FIELD TYPE to choose it, or instead of depending on Airtable’s default field type of “single line text”, Airtable just randomly chooses the field type of wherever your mouse was last hovering on the list! This should NEVER be the behavior in ANY application.

   Much of the time, I just want to create a single line text field, which was the default field type in the past. But now, the default field type is wherever your mouse is currently hovering! Even worse, when your mouse LEAVES THE DROPDOWN MENU, Airtable assumes that wherever you were LAST HOVERING is the field type that you wanted to create. This makes absolutely no sense. A simple mouse hover does not indicate that we want to change or set a field type. A CLICK OF A MOUSE BUTTON is what would indicate this. Please go back to how this behavior used to be!

   Your mouse can be ANYWHERE ON THE SCREEN at any time — Airtable should choose the field type just because your mouse was accidentally hovering over a specific area of the screen! No other part of Airtable behaves this way, and creating fields should not be this way either! Even worse than that, if you start typing a field type but your mouse is hovering somewhere else on the list of field types, Airtable will change the field type based on your mouse hovering as the list changes.

   And if you’re creating a single line text field, you can no longer simply type the name of the field and then hit return to create a single line text field. You are required to take extra steps to always make sure that you choose the field type, because your field type could be anything. Before, we could just quickly create a whole bunch fields. Now, wherever your mouse was accidentally last hovering is the field type that is automatically chosen by Airtable on your behalf.

5. The View side panel: The “Create A View” area at the bottom takes up too much space on small screens. Sometimes people can only see 2 or 3 of their actual views on a MacBook Air screen (especially if they add “View Descriptions” to their views), but they always see the “Create A View” area at the bottom. This area should be collapsible.

6. Column headers: These should be vertically resizable & allow word wrapping onto multiple lines, so we don’t have to extend our field widths just to see the names of long fields. I have lost clients due to this issue — clients who have actually left Airtable to go back to Microsoft Excel because of this.

7. On the grid view, there should be an easier way to create new records. Ideally, a “New Record” button in the toolbar. Or a floating plus sign that is always visible on the screen. Currently, if records are ungrouped, users have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of their grid to find the plus sign, which can be a real challenge when they have tens of thousands of records. Or, they have to right-click and choose “Insert Record Above” or “Insert Record Below”, which is not very intuitive. Just a simple “New Record” button in the toolbar would be great.

8. Dynamic variables for conditionals in fields: This is the big one, and this would be the #1 biggest game-changer for Airtable as a database platform. Everyone has been clamoring for this feature, and the ironic thing is that you have already rolled this out to Automations in the “Find Records” action! We need this to be a part of fields as well! We desperately need the ability to have dynamic variables for conditionals in Lookup fields, rollup fields, and linked record fields! 100% of our clients have desperately needed this feature for ages now, and people have been requesting this for years now. And — you guys have already rolled this out to Automations, so it is clear that this can be done!

9. Linked Record Fields: It’s nice that we can filter linked record fields to only allow us to choose certain records (based on a view), but we should also have the option to disable that little “Add New Records” button that appears at the bottom of the linked record selection screen. That would prevent users from choosing an option that isn’t in the filtered list. Otherwise, as it stands now, they can just freeform type any value that they want, even if we’ve already filtered the list for them.

10. Buttons should be more dynamic. Button titles should be formula based, so they can change their title based on the situation. And buttons need to be able to trigger automations. Additionally, one button should be able to trigger different automations, based on a conditional formula. In other words, one button should be able to perform different actions based on different situations.

11. Search Records App — Great app, but why no “export to CSV” ability? It’s only partially useful without that feature.

12. Ability to print from apps (or create PDF files from them). Currently, people can’t do anything with apps like the Chart app. Most of my clients have wanted to print their charts or save them as a PDF file or email them or embed them in an attachment field. All they can do now is take a screenshot of their apps.

13. Page Designer App — This app needs a lot of work, and we could take up an entire thread discussing all the dozens of improvements needed here. We need the ability to fully automate this, we need the ability to automatically create PDFs & do something with those PDFs (email, embed in an attachment field, etc.), and we really really really need the ability to have a variable amount of linked records on our page & have Page Designer automatically adjust the number of pages. Also, the default font that Airtable uses (“Inter”) has bugs when printing. There are literally dozens of improvements needed to this app. In fact, this app should really become its own view, so we have “custom views”.

14. It’s too easy for information to get hidden in fields, meaning that people don’t know that there is more information to see in a field. Fields should ALWAYS SHOW A VISUAL INDICATOR if there is MORE INFORMATION than what can currently be displayed on the screen. We should be able to see 3 dots (an ellipsis) if fields have more information in them than what can currently be seen. This is a huge problem with long text fields, multiple select fields, and single line text fields. However, ALL fields would benefit from this improvement. All fields currently hide lengthy information from the user’s sight, and the user has absolutely no way of knowing that there is more information to see in the field! We need some sort of a visual indicator if there is more information to be seen in the fields.

15. Hidden fields in forms should be able to have their values submitted. This is the #1 thing that people have needed in their forms.

16. There are too many disappearing interface elements throughout Airtable, which makes customers confused & doesn’t allow customers to truly discover the full depth of the product. For example, the button field doesn’t show you all of your options all the time. If you’re on a synced table, suddenly you get more options available to you! But if you’ve been accustomed to working with button fields in the past, you would never even think about “checking to see if new options have suddenly appeared on your button field”, simply because you’re on a synced table. All options should be visible at all times, but unusable options should be dimmed so you can’t select them. Same exact problem with the “Create A View” section of the Views Sidebar. The ability to create a form completely disappears when you’re on a synced view! This can truly be panic-inducing to someone! It should always say “Form” there, but it should just be dimmed when you can’t select it.

17. Formula box: This is a real problem. This needs to be completely revamped. It needs to be larger, it needs to allow carriage returns, it needs to retain spacing on Safari, and it most definitely needs to accept curly quotation marks. It is also in desperate need of better debugging — at the very least, please let us know WHERE the error took place, even if it can’t tell us WHAT the error is. Perhaps syntax coloring as well.

18. Find Records / Update Records Automation - this needs to be able to handle multiple records. Currently, this only works if it finds one record. It doesn’t work if it finds multiple records. And if it yields ZERO RECORDS, guess what? The Automation results in an ERROR MESSAGE and it emails people about the error message. That’s actually not an error, so people shouldn’t be receiving error message emails simply because it found zero records.

(By the way, another HUGE problem that Airtable quietly fixed this week is that Airtable no longer hides extra spaces when displaying field values! For the first time ever, Airtable actually shows us the real data in our fields! :slightly_smiling_face: This is going to make a huge difference when troubleshooting filters, sorts, groups, automations, scripts, API calls, everything. So thank you for fixing that problem!) UPDATE: This issue has actually not been fixed. :frowning: Please add this into the list of major bugs that needs to be fixed ASAP.

Anyways, thanks for listening, and I hope that we can have more productive product development conversations in the future — perhaps on monthly Zoom calls! :slightly_smiling_face:

[Databaser]

ScottWorld:

Number & currency fields: These fields only allow formatting for USA & Canada. 80% of the world uses a different number & currency formatting than us, including most of Europe. This seems like such an easy fix. I have lost European clients due to this issue.

Also: the “phone number” field, which we can’t do anything with here in Europe.

ScottWorld:

The View side panel: The “Create A View” area at the bottom takes up too much space on small screens.

Plus: sections for automations!

ScottWorld:

On the grid view, there should be an easier way to create new records. Ideally, a “New Record” button in the toolbar.

Yes, this would help A LOT of people. Because even in “big enterprise clients” there are people that can use a bit of guidance.

ScottWorld:

Dynamic variables for conditionals in fields: This is the big one, and this would be the #1 biggest game-changer for Airtable as a database platform. Everyone has been clamoring for this feature, and the ironic thing is that you have already rolled this out to Automations in the “Find Records” action!

Yes! And please, make it possible to “update records” after a “find” action! SOOOO many use cases.

ScottWorld:

Linked Record Fields: It’s nice that we can filter linked record fields to only allow us to choose certain records (based on a view), but we should also have the option to disable that little “Add New Records” button that appears at the bottom of the linked record selection screen.

Also a big +1. You wouldn’t believe how much unnecessary options are created by my clients which leads to mistakes in eg dashboard charts, groups, …

ScottWorld:

Page Designer App

This is just half baked quality, which should never be accepted.

ScottWorld:

Find Records / Update Records Automation - this needs to be able to handle multiple records. Currently, this only works if it finds one record. It doesn’t work if it finds multiple records. And if it yields ZERO RECORDS, guess what? The Automation results in an ERROR MESSAGE and it emails people about the error message. That’s actually not an error, so people shouldn’t be receiving error message emails simply because it found zero records.

You kept the best for last :slightly_smiling_face: Finding records and being able to update them would be a big game changer. It’s also ridiculous that, when we automate orders to suppliers for instance, they receive empty mails when there are no orders.

ScottWorld:

In fact, you have an amazing group of Airtable consultants & Airtable power users right here on the forums, who provide about 90% of the answers on these forums & who service hundreds of clients who use Airtable.

I hope Airtable recognizes the immense contribution from the likes of @ScottWorld, @kuovonne, @Bill.French and others (to only name a few) in this community (and elsewhere no doubt)!

[ScottWorld]

Databaser:

I hope Airtable recognizes the immense contribution from the likes of @ScottWorld, @kuovonne, @Bill.French and others (to only name a few) in this community (and elsewhere no doubt)!

Thank so much, @Databaser! Great additional suggestions from you, too! :grinning:

Oh, and @Christy_Roach, one other thing I realized too:

• It would be IMMENSELY HELPFUL if Airtable publicly released the list of bug fixes & small improvements in each product update as well.

  Currently, Airtable only releases the list of brand new features, but often, it is the little fixes & little improvements that are much more important to us.

  For example, in this last week, you guys fixed so many longstanding & important issues — including the “visually hiding extra spaces” issue which has been driving people nuts for years — that it would be really nice to read a comprehensive list of all these fixes & improvements somewhere. UPDATE: This bug has not actually been fixed. :frowning:

  All of these fixes are reasons to celebrate, and Airtable should be proud of publishing them! :partying_face:

  Plus, it makes our lives easier to be aware of what has changed, instead of us manually hunting for changes.

  Currently, we are always surprised when we stumble onto something that has been fixed or improved in the product, so it would be really nice to have an official list somewhere.

[Justin_Barrett]

ScottWorld:

For example, in this last week, you guys fixed so many longstanding & important issues — including the “visually hiding extra spaces” issue which has been driving people nuts for years

Where are you seeing that “fixed”? It still compresses extra spaces for me, at least when a field isn’t selected. What does appear to be new, though, is that selecting a cell without editing it will make extra spaces appear if present. Is that what you’re talking about?

[ScottWorld]

Justin_Barrett:

Where are you seeing that “fixed”? It still compresses extra spaces for me, at least when a field isn’t selected. What does appear to be new, though, is that selecting a cell without editing it will make extra spaces appear if present. Is that what you’re talking about?

Omg, you’re right. This was fixed the other day, and now it’s back to its previous irrational behavior again. :man_facepalming: Very annoying. This must be one of those things that Airtable is testing & untesting.

@Christy_Roach Can we please have this issue permanently fixed?