other time saving tips

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  Use page notes chrome extension to save the regular expression. So you can access text notes on that specific page

  
  


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  Bookmark the tool page on chrome bookmarks

  
  


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  If you do this workflow often, you can cut out steps 9 to 11 with a premade formatted google spreadsheet.

  
  

Other useful tools for post-processing once its in google spreadsheet

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  I use http://txtformat.com/ often for many database/ airtable related tasks, its used to find/replace data in bulk. Useful if you need to format data in the google spreadsheet after. Sometimes referred to as an “ETL” extract transform load process.

  
  


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  https://www.browserling.com/tools/text-truncate is good to get the first few characters of data on cell. If you have long descriptions for items, but don’t want to see entire text printout

  
  

Notes on why to use google spreadsheet collaboration this way

Googlespreadsheet workflow I outlined is best used if your working with someone outside your team. Say you outsource data-entry tasks on fiverr.com or something along those lines. Or perhaps someone to write product descriptions. You haven’t vetted how reliable they are yet. You send them hard copies of what data they need to enter.

You don’t expect to receive that data until 2+ weeks out all at the same time. Its not for incremental deliveries. Its for milestone deliveries.

You also need to do a random spotcheck to ensure data reliability. Google spreadsheet has ways of catching data with errors easily. For instance, conditional formatting for “duplicate entries”. You might also need to post-format data entered from that person as well. Perhaps they might have entered phone numbers with different formatting conventions such as 444-444-4444 and also with (444)444-4444.

Because you do error checking this way, you ensure your airtable base is clean data. You also get access to airtable’s collaboration / errorchecking tools as well.

General things about google spreadsheet collaboration

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  You can print out some nice pricing sheets with this workflow. If you need to send an updating pricing list to clients this is a great way to do so.

  
  


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  you can protect columns of data from being edited in google spreadsheets. So if you send data to someone for bulk data entry, you can be sure your primaryKeys (first column of data) are the same, when its sent back to you

  
  


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  If you add new rows of data in your airtable database after, the row numbers won’t match the spreadsheet you sent out. You can have a temporary googlesheet do vlookups as a solution

  
  

had to use this again, realized one of the formatting strings was incorrect

for browserling https://www.browserling.com/tools/regex-extract-matches, I had this

/http[s?]://.*(.png|.jpg|.JPG)/g

when it should really be this:

/http[s?]://.*(.png|.jpg|.jpeg|.JPG)/g

Is there a solution to export images so they are physical image files on a hard drive (with file names that match something in Airtable)? This would be VERY helpful and I have a need to use it today, so hoping someone may have found a solution. Thanks so much.

@Vincent_Tang This was incredibly helpful! My only question: is there a reason why you don’t use Google Sheets REGEXEXTRACT formula? I tried using the same regex you provided and it doesn’t work, but I wanted to know if there’s any way to use it within google sheets?

I only ask, because not all of my issues have images, and the tool you linked removes empty lines, so it would be helpful to do it right within the sheet.

Yes, we built this solution.

Vincent , Your solution is very useful and a big time saver . Now that Airtable has introduced 3 REGEX functions , do you think the extraction can be done inside Airtable by using the REGEX_EXTRACT(string, regex) function. I do not understand coding and it would be great if you can tell me if this can be done and how to do this .

Vincent, I was able to figure it out, Thanks.

I just used REGEX_EXTRACT({Notes},“https?://.+[^)]”) .

With this I do not need to use browserling for downloading image files after renaming them.

Thanks a ton

Exporting images is a little bit trickier these days because Airtable's attachment URLs expire after 2 hours of being accessed outside of Airtable, so I typically use Make's Airtable Automations to help my clients export their images out of Airtable and into other apps.

p.s. If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld