It would be great if it was possible to FORMAT TEXT (fonts, colors, bold, italics), CELLS (left, right, center alignment, background colors), and BORDERS (bold or dashed lines, colors) within tables. The ability to add extra header lines and/or to FREEZE more cells vertically and horizontally would help, too.
I really like the idea of Airtable, but can’t effectively use it over Excel until it has more functionality.
I’ve only been using Airtable for a couple of days, and one of the things I really miss is the ability to add color to rows, columns and individual cells. We’re testing a migration from Excel to Airtable, and we rely on color quite a bit, especially to flag pending tasks that require immediate attention. It’s a surprise to find that a utility that relies so much on visual organization would lack something so a) simple, and b) important.
In our case, customer orders tend to be processed in batches sent to a vendor. We color-code batches’ submission date with alternating colors – every-other batch is either red or blue (only the “submission date” column is color-coded). That allows us to immediately ID a batch and quickly find the individual order we need to look at.
I am also desperate for this functionality. Airtable could be incredible for organizing writing projects, potentially better than my favorites (Scrivener, which I felt made me dig and dig for functionality that’s really easy in Airtable, and Ulysses which is a bit too hierarchal for many things I want to do). But it doesn’t handle text formatting or large chunks of text very well right now.
I understand if Airtable isn’t interested in catering very much to that sort of usage. The thing is… it would be SO GOOD at it, for one, and one of the things that has gripped me about Airtable is its potential to be almost any program I could need it to be. But okay okay, even aside from that, there’s a lot of reasons people would want to organize large formatted chunks of texts. For example, 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, so they want the entire text… and it’s difficult to follow without bold, or italics are important for style norms in your field and it makes you look sloppy or unprofessional when you copy from some record and don’t realize the formatting was lost, etc.
I, too, would be happy with Markdown functionality at minimum. But really I think the basics, like bold, italics, underline, hyperlinks, headers, fonts, font sizes, colors, borders, etc – basically the most widely-used CSS stuff – would open a lot of doors for what Airtable can do. (I think there’s already a thread for responsive formatting so, yes, there’s obviously that too.)
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! The more specific feedback we get on how and why certain features would be useful to you, the easier it is for us to incorporate all of that feedback into a better product. :slightly_smiling_face:
Rich text formatting is definitely on our future roadmap. Are there any WYSIWYG editors that you think are particularly well done?
I’d like the ability to custom URL’s added in fields eg. replace a long URL name with just “click here”
On the topic of table formatting - current Airtables look old fashioned - this picture for instance is a much cleaner look for a table, which you can’t do with Airtable:
Is there any timeline to get rich text / markdown into AirTable?
This is really the one feature that prevents us from even considering using this tool, which, otherwise, looks very flexible and full of potential.
I find it almost ironic that I am filling this form in a field that is a rich text field…
