Hi here’s a workflow I’ve been using for quickly exporting out an airtable base’s table into google spreadsheet.
There’s a number of reasons why you would want to do this:
You have a file that needs to be analyzed by someone for a one time use. This could be your accountant, purchasing dept, etc.
You need a better printout of your airtable data. Airtables printouts right now are okay, I have issues getting a nice printout sometimes. Google spreadsheets has lots of flexibility here
You want someone to do data entry for your base but would rather have them enter the data, send it back, so you can double check it before throwing it into your airtable base
You want your cells to do anything for a few niche cases - Airtable is great in that it doesn’t allow you to do certain things… but sometimes you might want to have a specialized formula pasted randomly throughout your google spreadsheet.
You’d rather not use excel for a number of reasons, possibly because it doesn’t fit your use-cases compared to google spreadsheets
One issue you’ll run across when copy pasting your base into google spreadsheets is the images won’t transfer over right away.
Here’s the solution:
- CTRL+A select everything from your current view on your base’s table
- CTRL+C copy
- CTRL+V paste into a spreadsheet
For reference, I am using my doggo base that I used for my bulk image downloader example
Pasting this into google spreadsheets looks like so
NEXT STEPS
For your images, there should only be one image in that column. If you are using multiple images in a column this won’t work
- Head over to https://www.browserling.com/tools/regex-extract-matches.
- Dump
/http[s?]://.*(.png|.jpg|.JPG)/g
in #1. - Paste your raw image data in #2.
- Press Extract matches in #3.
- CTRL+C , Copy the resulting data
- CTRL+V in google spreadsheet
Data should look clean now
NEXT NEXT STEP
Your going to want to do two things to make the image play nicely.
- Use a formula for embedding image sizes
- Adjust the row height
Adjusting the row height looks like so. Click the first row, hold SHIFT, click last row, → resize rows. Enter new value
Use =IMAGE(B1,1)
to have the image resize into cell, and then drill down the image
You can go back and resize the row height as needed. Image should auto adjust. After that you can print off the file
TL-DR Too Long, Didn’t Read
If you want a quick way to export your airtable to googlespreadsheets, use the following approach.
- Have all the data you want to export out on your screen in one table inside your base. This means do your Lookups, linking fields, etc ahead of time
- CTRL+A select all data
- CTRL+C copy all data
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/
- CTRL+V paste data
- Copy your image column data
- https://www.browserling.com/tools/regex-extract-matches
/http[s?]://.*(.png|.jpg|.JPG|.jpeg)/g
, dump your data, extract matches, copy and paste results
=IMAGE(B1,1)
in column C, filldown the rest- Select first row, hold SHIFT, select last row → right click, resize rows → enter new value
- Do number 10 again until you like the size of your images
Now you can do whatever you want with data.
Print it off, let someone do data entry on it, do some one time analysis, use all the features in google spreadsheet, etc.
Take all the work done by the other person, check for quality, import it back into your airtable if needed.
Some nice features of google spreadsheets is seeing what the other person is clicking in real time. Also, now you have lots of disposable quick collaborative workspaces