New: Setting custom record terminology

Nice, thanks! Could you perhaps explain the reasoning behind not supporting a custom option? I’m sure there’ll be a lot of requests and it might assuage them?

Since these terms will appear throughout the product, we wanted to make sure that the options work well everywhere they will show up. In addition, as we think about supporting other languages in Airtable in the future, we also wanted to make sure these terms will work.

We’ll keep an eye on the requests and would love to know if there’s any options you think are missing! We’ll be regularly adding new terms as needed.

Since these terms will appear throughout the product, we wanted to make sure that the options work well everywhere they will show up. In addition, as we think about supporting other languages in Airtable in the future, we also wanted to make sure these terms will work.

We’ll keep an eye on the requests and would love to know if there’s any options you think are missing! We’ll be regularly adding new terms as needed.

@Ayesha_Bose @Jordan_Scott1

I am posting this publicly on behalf of many people who have messaged me privately about this but do not want to post their thoughts publicly.

In our personal opinions, many of us believe that this new feature is unhelpful, unnecessary, and poorly thought out. (This new feature is also confusing because it now requires additional training to our customers who now have to see this every time they create a new table.)

Additionally, since much of the Airtable product line doesn’t yet refer to these new labels, this seems to have been rolled out prematurely.

Also, the lack of the proper pluralized version of “person” (and possibly other nouns coming in the future) also shows that this was rolled out prematurely, because the code was designed to just tack on an “s” to the end of any noun in the list. There are hundreds of nouns that aren’t pluralized in this way. Man/men, woman/women, child/children, family/families, supply/supplies, syllabus/syllabi, stimulus/stimuli, species/species, quiz/quizzes, diagnosis/diagnoses, and many more nouns that our customers are currently using for their records.

And most of all, it says on Airtable’s About Page:

Airtable was founded on the belief that software shouldn’t dictate how you work—you should dictate how it works. Our mission is to democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs. People around the world use Airtable to do everything from cattle tracking to filmmaking.

We don’t see how limiting people to a small list of preselected nouns lives up to this mission of letting customers dictate how their software should work, instead of the other way around. As the perfect example, your very mission statement mentions cattle tracking and filmmaking, yet your curated list of nouns doesn’t include either “cow” or “cattle”. It also doesn’t contain any filmmaking terms, such as “scene”, “character”, “shot”, etc.

The only way that this feature could be helpful for our customers is if customers can specify their own custom terms, and if the entire product supported it. Right from the very beginning, this feature should have been rolled out to ONLY allow custom nouns: have the user enter the “singular version” of the noun, and enter the “plural version” of the noun.

But even if this was rolled out to be a 100% custom feature, we still believe that this was an unnecessary addition to the product, and we are pretty disappointed that internal resources were dedicated to this feature above any of the hundreds of more pressing needs that customers have been requesting for years. How did this get prioritized over much more pressing needs?

Please note that nobody is criticizing you personally. We are criticizing this feature, and this feature alone. Airtable seems to mistakenly confuse critiques of the product with critiques of people. We are not criticizing the people who probably worked very hard on this feature. We are criticizing the feature itself, and we are also surprised that there was no communication with customers about this before it was rolled out, so we could give preliminary feedback on it before it went live.

@Ayesha_Bose @Jordan_Scott1

I am posting this publicly on behalf of many people who have messaged me privately about this but do not want to post their thoughts publicly.

In our personal opinions, many of us believe that this new feature is unhelpful, unnecessary, and poorly thought out. (This new feature is also confusing because it now requires additional training to our customers who now have to see this every time they create a new table.)

Additionally, since much of the Airtable product line doesn’t yet refer to these new labels, this seems to have been rolled out prematurely.

Also, the lack of the proper pluralized version of “person” (and possibly other nouns coming in the future) also shows that this was rolled out prematurely, because the code was designed to just tack on an “s” to the end of any noun in the list. There are hundreds of nouns that aren’t pluralized in this way. Man/men, woman/women, child/children, family/families, supply/supplies, syllabus/syllabi, stimulus/stimuli, species/species, quiz/quizzes, diagnosis/diagnoses, and many more nouns that our customers are currently using for their records.

And most of all, it says on Airtable’s About Page:

Airtable was founded on the belief that software shouldn’t dictate how you work—you should dictate how it works. Our mission is to democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs. People around the world use Airtable to do everything from cattle tracking to filmmaking.

We don’t see how limiting people to a small list of preselected nouns lives up to this mission of letting customers dictate how their software should work, instead of the other way around. As the perfect example, your very mission statement mentions cattle tracking and filmmaking, yet your curated list of nouns doesn’t include either “cow” or “cattle”. It also doesn’t contain any filmmaking terms, such as “scene”, “character”, “shot”, etc.

The only way that this feature could be helpful for our customers is if customers can specify their own custom terms, and if the entire product supported it. Right from the very beginning, this feature should have been rolled out to ONLY allow custom nouns: have the user enter the “singular version” of the noun, and enter the “plural version” of the noun.

But even if this was rolled out to be a 100% custom feature, we still believe that this was an unnecessary addition to the product, and we are pretty disappointed that internal resources were dedicated to this feature above any of the hundreds of more pressing needs that customers have been requesting for years. How did this get prioritized over much more pressing needs?

Please note that nobody is criticizing you personally. We are criticizing this feature, and this feature alone. Airtable seems to mistakenly confuse critiques of the product with critiques of people. We are not criticizing the people who probably worked very hard on this feature. We are criticizing the feature itself, and we are also surprised that there was no communication with customers about this before it was rolled out, so we could give preliminary feedback on it before it went live.

Respectfully disagree. I think it’s nice to be able to specify it, iso always “record(s)”.

Absolutely agree with this though! The list of customer requests, some more simple than others I’ll agree, is just unbelievable…

Agree with you @ScottWorld, only a custom term for each table, and it will probably come to this because the list is going to be a very, very long list… I need Boxes or Cartons, no sorry Parcels, etc… That’s why I’m not making any request, waiting the “custom labels” for records.

@Ayesha_Bose @Jordan_Scott1

I am posting this publicly on behalf of many people who have messaged me privately about this but do not want to post their thoughts publicly.

In our personal opinions, many of us believe that this new feature is unhelpful, unnecessary, and poorly thought out. (This new feature is also confusing because it now requires additional training to our customers who now have to see this every time they create a new table.)

Additionally, since much of the Airtable product line doesn’t yet refer to these new labels, this seems to have been rolled out prematurely.

Also, the lack of the proper pluralized version of “person” (and possibly other nouns coming in the future) also shows that this was rolled out prematurely, because the code was designed to just tack on an “s” to the end of any noun in the list. There are hundreds of nouns that aren’t pluralized in this way. Man/men, woman/women, child/children, family/families, supply/supplies, syllabus/syllabi, stimulus/stimuli, species/species, quiz/quizzes, diagnosis/diagnoses, and many more nouns that our customers are currently using for their records.

And most of all, it says on Airtable’s About Page:

Airtable was founded on the belief that software shouldn’t dictate how you work—you should dictate how it works. Our mission is to democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs. People around the world use Airtable to do everything from cattle tracking to filmmaking.

We don’t see how limiting people to a small list of preselected nouns lives up to this mission of letting customers dictate how their software should work, instead of the other way around. As the perfect example, your very mission statement mentions cattle tracking and filmmaking, yet your curated list of nouns doesn’t include either “cow” or “cattle”. It also doesn’t contain any filmmaking terms, such as “scene”, “character”, “shot”, etc.

The only way that this feature could be helpful for our customers is if customers can specify their own custom terms, and if the entire product supported it. Right from the very beginning, this feature should have been rolled out to ONLY allow custom nouns: have the user enter the “singular version” of the noun, and enter the “plural version” of the noun.

But even if this was rolled out to be a 100% custom feature, we still believe that this was an unnecessary addition to the product, and we are pretty disappointed that internal resources were dedicated to this feature above any of the hundreds of more pressing needs that customers have been requesting for years. How did this get prioritized over much more pressing needs?

Please note that nobody is criticizing you personally. We are criticizing this feature, and this feature alone. Airtable seems to mistakenly confuse critiques of the product with critiques of people. We are not criticizing the people who probably worked very hard on this feature. We are criticizing the feature itself, and we are also surprised that there was no communication with customers about this before it was rolled out, so we could give preliminary feedback on it before it went live.

Hi @Ayesha_Bose,

One of the big problems with the new custom record terminology is that it tries to automatically guess what the record terminology should be for people. However, it often guesses wrong, and people don’t notice that Airtable has made this choice on their behalf. Therefore, people end up having incorrect custom record terminology.

For example, my clients have experienced all of these problems:

• They created a table called “Company Requirements”. Airtable automatically chose “company” as the record term.


• They created a table called “Order Line Items”. Airtable automatically chose “order” as the record term.


• They created a table called “Employee Contracts”. Airtable automatically chose “employee” as the record term.

This auto-guessing functionality should really be removed from this feature, because it is causing a significant amount of confusion & headache for my clients.

Thank you,

Scott

Yah, I just did a demo to new users, their first hands on with Airtable - and this auto-naming caught me off guard.

Since these terms will appear throughout the product, we wanted to make sure that the options work well everywhere they will show up. In addition, as we think about supporting other languages in Airtable in the future, we also wanted to make sure these terms will work.

We’ll keep an eye on the requests and would love to know if there’s any options you think are missing! We’ll be regularly adding new terms as needed.

Hi @Ayesha_Bose,

One of the big problems with the new custom record terminology is that it tries to automatically guess what the record terminology should be for people. However, it often guesses wrong, and people don’t notice that Airtable has made this choice on their behalf. Therefore, people end up having incorrect custom record terminology.

For example, my clients have experienced all of these problems:

• They created a table called “Company Requirements”. Airtable automatically chose “company” as the record term.


• They created a table called “Order Line Items”. Airtable automatically chose “order” as the record term.


• They created a table called “Employee Contracts”. Airtable automatically chose “employee” as the record term.

This auto-guessing functionality should really be removed from this feature, because it is causing a significant amount of confusion & headache for my clients.

Thank you,

Scott