I think it would be nice to have the option to hyperlink with different text showing, like any basic HTML hyperlinking. Like I can even do in this forum if I needed to.
Visually, having the url just there isn’t appealing.
It’s simple Bill. In the age of the internet, we want an URL in a text field. This is about the simplest thing you could ever ask of a web based product. Albeit an extremely limited product…
Indeed, I totally agree. However, I am only offering the community insight about a relatively useful approach to overcome this essential [web link] requirement that has been asked for and addressed by many apps since what - late 1997?
It’s not as if the separation of URLs and link names is a new thing, right? In fact, to put this into perspective, it’s very likely that this basic [web] concept was possible before the Airtable developers were born.
It is, and this specific request was initially created in 2016, so it’s coming up on half-a-decade. No reasonable and common feature expectation should be allowed to languish for a half-decade which is roughly the equivalent of 35 Internet years.
What’s the Problem?
My hypothesis is that this feature is challenging for the Airtable team because of some early architectural choices. Have you often wondered why so many Airtable apps suffer from formula field bloat? (i.e., multiple formula fields that serve to create intermediate or final values from other field values)
Unlike the vast majority of spreadsheet apps where multiple property layers make it possible for a single cell to have both a formula and a value, Airtable doesn’t support this design. And I believe that the inability to store a URL with a link name and render it with grace and beauty is because of this design limitation.
But even if my assessment is accurate, we can’t broadly indict Airtable for making this design choice any more than we can assume they aren’t doing something about it as we chat. This, and many other seemingly obvious requirements, happen in all products and tend to wane as the product and the customer base matures.
In the meantime, there are now a few remedies where there were none at all just 6 months ago. They’re not ideal remedies and they often require scripting in a “code-free” solution, a deep irony that does not escape my sense of humour.
Apparently you didn’t read my response or I wasn’t entirely clear in my prose. Airtable is actually more than five years old and they do support linked URLs as evidenced by my screen shots. I don’t build or support any Airtable solution that openly displays URLs unless specifically asked to do so by my clients.
I get it; you’re upset that Airtable doesn’t work like other products in the “sheets” genre; that’s a fair criticism that I fully agree with and stated as much. However, dredging up complaints from 2018 that are no longer completely accurate reflections about the current state of Airtable is not helpful to users or to encourage Airtable to do better.
Scandalous?
In the grand scheme of things that should be addressed in Airtable, this feature doesn’t even make the top 25. :winking_face: If lack of integrated and native support for embedded field is scandalous, half the stuff I delivered to clients last week should be on the front page of the Enquirer.
The real problem was that it wasn’t documented that URLs can be added by enabling a long text to with rich text formatting… This the enables full URL functionality. However, I couldn’t find a single reference in any support material explaining this…
Yep - this approach is not ideally documented to show these dependencies. But, rich-text implies embedded links which [then] implies the use of a [long] text field as if it were simply a smart [short] text field with embedded URL abilities. It’s the classic definition of a workaround, so it’s not surprising this is not fully documented.
What’s more surprising is Airtable 's markdown documentation doesn’t appear to reflect the actual behaviour of rich-text links.
I find that I am able to enter some Markdown formatting when typing text, such as bold, italic, lists, checkboxes, but not others.
I find that if I copy/paste text, Airtable does some behind-the-scenes processing to adjust Markdown code. For example, if I copy bold text from a rich text field and paste it in a different app, it won’t be bold in the other app. If I copy Markdown source text into a rich text field, the markdown syntax is escaped and shows up as plain text.
