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.
+1000 on this. We use Airtable to manage large amounts of content for our Wordpress clients, and giving them the ability to add simple formatting (much like your comment box here) would be a game changer for us and them. It’s the one last feature we’re dying for AirTable to implement.
+99999 on thiw ! I need to be able to store articles ready to post to wordpress. So a rich text editor is a must! Airtable can be used as an article management system. For example I currently work with many authors that write articles for me. Then I store all my articles and post them to different websites for my clients. It would be so easy for me to create one form in which my writers can paste their articles when completed. Then I could just as easily copy paste and publish those articles to my client websites. All of this would’ve been possible if Airtable had a text field which supports rich text. It would be the perfect article management system!
Any update on the Rich Text Formatting? As others have mentioned, this is a big drawback for fully converting from other spreadsheets. The beauty and ease of use of Airtable is hampered by the inability to “bold” or “color” headers and categories in my layouts for clearer viewing of my information.
If rich text formatting takes a while to implement, maybe you could instruct us how to use zapier to make ‘structuring block text’ (without the need for rich text bolding, underlining, etc.) happen with form integration content in the meantime.
When I used asana as my primary project management service (like a month ago), I was able to have multiple field form content get compiled into one ‘multiline description text field’ using a zap. Example:http://example.24hrtees.net/kBGX
If there is a ‘formatter’ option inside of zapier that would basically be a place holder as an initial action step, where we could format how we want our text organized, and then we could use that step to put content into your current text fields, I think that’s all Il need for the time being…but as it currently is, I can’t find an integration solution inside of zapier that allows me to either ‘expand your text field for multi-line support’ (similar to my example above) or to just be the organizer of text on its own.
This is a must-have for us :slightly_smiling_face:
Some kind of a “formatted text” type for a field would allow us to use Airtable like a mini-wiki. (Markdown is fine, but a Slack/Medium-like editor would be more user-friendly I guess)
Formatting rows and cells would be awesome, for example we’d need to set the opacity of a row to 50% if its cell “done” is checked, to better handle projects checklists.
Markdown support would be amazing to have in text fields.
I dont see the need for color formatting of text, cells, etc. I can’t think of multiple ways to accomplish what color coding would accomplish using an additional field. To me, airtable is about making your information useful while looking nice but not nice enough to be used for presentation. It’s not for presentation or visual displays of information. If you need that then you should export your data to make some kind of color coded table or display.
Hmm Airtable defines itself as something between a spreadsheet and a database. Dynamic cell formatting is what I miss the most from the first one. Of course I could create a small app, retrieve infos from Airtable via the API, format lines… But I think it would be better to have it inside the same tool.
I think the bread and butter of airtable is organization as a utility. So if airtable were to add formatting it should be for utility, not for pure aesthetic purposes. I dont think they should add formatting to their current views, because those views are designed for utility.
What might be nice, is a view designed specifically for aesthetics, a separate tool for making tables, charts, and graphs from your airtable data. I can imagine a “presentation” view where you open the view and you’re shown a list of possible tables, charts, or graphs. You select one, then walk through selecting your data from another table in that base. You would have the same great filtering tools as you do in other views. Then you could even generate an iframe to embed elsewhere, which will live update with your data. That would be helpful, and seems like a more realistic feature.
I see your point, but I’m not convinced. I’m actually talking about utility formatting, such as semi-transparent lines or cards if “done” field is checked, or green/red background according to a 1/0 value for example. I don’t want to format every field with Comic sans MS :slightly_smiling_face: I think the same behavior as formula field with a few properties to be altered would suffice.
I know there’s a beta feature in progress for charts views in Airtable (but couldn’t get to test it yet), but these are two distinct features IMO. The iframe feature actually already exists if you embed the public view shared URL, so I guess it should be the same with this chart view.
Personally, I’d rather prefer some special type field for bullets, something like “multiple select” but which would appear as a list (for subtasks for exemple).
The only way to do that now is to create a link field but it’s not very practical nor quick.
