Welcome to the very first edition of The Airtable Effect—a monthly roundup of what’s new, what’s inspiring, and what’s possible with Airtable. Whether you're an everyday builder, a certified pro, or just getting started, this newsletter is for you.
In each rendition of the newsletter, we’ll bring you:
- New product and program launches and updates
- The latest educational content from Airtable Academy
- Highlights from the Airtable Community
- Upcoming events you won’t want to miss
You can find The Airtable Effect every month:
- In your inbox (are you opted into marketing emails?)
- On LinkedIn (make sure to subscribe!)
- In the Airtable Community (right here in the Onboarding Resources area!)
✨ Introducing the New Airtable Community
We’ve redesigned the Airtable Community experience to make it easier to connect, collaborate, and grow your skills.
Highlights include:
An overhauled content structure
Share your latest build or get inspired by others on the Builders Board and get your questions answered by fellow community members in Ask a Question (which can now automatically create cases for our Support team to review if they go unanswered).
We’ve also created a new Welcome category where users can find our guidelines, onboarding resources (including our monthly onboarding office hours events!), and announcements from our product team.
Community user groups (join one!)
Airtable User Groups are for users with shared industries, use-cases, goals, and/or interests to come together to collaborate, learn, and grow. By joining a user group, you’ll find member-led, peer-to-peer support, contextual, relevant insights, and tailored events—all built around your industry or Airtable use-case.
Today, you can join a user group for AI, Marketing, Higher Education (our ‘EDUsers’), and Product Operations. Enterprise customers also have access to the Airtable Enterprise Network (or ‘AEN’), our private user group and go-to hub for connecting with other Airtable Enterprise customers.
A product ideas flow integrated into Airtable
We’ve transformed how community members can share product ideas with Airtable by integrating the product ideas submission form directly into our Product team’s development workflow.
This new process ensures (1) your ideas are surfaced directly to the right people and product teams at Airtable and (2) your ideas are embedded directly into our product team’s workflow for streamlined review & action.
Community members can also expect a recurring readout, including the recurring themes and patterns from community-sourced feedback and insights into how ideas tie back to recent launches and the upcoming roadmap.
🏅 Now Live: AI-App Builder Learning Path + Certification
Ready to build smarter with AI? Our newest Airtable Academy learning path walks you through using AI in your Airtable apps—and helps you prove your skills with the AI-App Builder certification at the end.
You'll learn the fundamentals of large language models, foundations in crafting thoughtful and impactful prompts for LLMs, a deep dive into suitable use cases for AI at your business and more.
Ready for the certification?
The AI App Builder Certification is designed for professionals who aim to integrate AI into business workflows, optimize automation, and enhance decision-making processes. The core audience includes citizen developers, functional team leaders, AI ambassadors, and business professionals who seek to implement AI-powered solutions without requiring deep technical expertise. These individuals are responsible for AI adoption, workflow automation, and strategic implementation within their organizations.
To pass the certification, candidates must demonstrate mastery of the following core competencies:
- AI Workflow Optimization: Understanding how to incorporate AI into workflows to enhance efficiency, including automating tasks such as summarization, categorization, and data analysis.
- Prompt Engineering: Crafting effective AI prompts to achieve high-quality and relevant outputs, ensuring that AI-generated content aligns with business needs.
- Validation and Accuracy Assurance: Implementing human-in-the-loop validation, leveraging AI confidence scores, and refining AI settings to minimize inaccuracies.
- AI Governance and Ethics: Ensuring AI use aligns with compliance, security, and ethical standards, particularly in regulated industries.
- Strategic AI Implementation: Identifying high-impact workflows for AI adoption, assessing AI maturity within an organization, and driving AI fluency among employees.
- Automation and Integration in Airtable: Utilizing AI fields, lookup fields, and automations within Airtable to streamline business processes.
By mastering these competencies, certified professionals can confidently design, deploy, and refine AI-powered workflows that drive measurable business value.
Register for the certification →
📅 Upcoming Events Calendar
We’ve got a packed calendar of live events, user group hangouts, and office hours. Here’s what’s coming up:
April 9 | Airtable NYC
At Airtable NYC, we’re bringing together builders, leaders, and doers for our biggest event yet. This isn’t about theory or hype—it’s about real-world impact. You’ll see how teams at the world’s most innovative companies are creating foundational workflows that power their most critical operations, with AI seamlessly embedded.
April 17 | Enterprise Network: Builder Office Hours
A space for enterprise builders to ask questions, swap strategies, and learn best practices from one another. (Enterprise customers only | Register here →)
April 22 | Onboarding Office Hours
New to Airtable? Join our onboarding team for a live Q&A and walkthrough of the resources available to you. (Register here →)
April 25 | Marketing User Group: The Future of Creative Ops in Airtable
How marketing teams are using Airtable to drive creative production—faster, smarter, and more collaboratively. (Register here →)
May 6 | Onboarding Office Hours
New to Airtable? Join our onboarding team for a live Q&A and walkthrough of the resources available to you. (Registration link coming soon!)
🧑🏫 Airtable Academy Updates
We’re always evolving Airtable Academy to reflect your feedback and learning goals:
🆕 New Launches
Value Realization: This course delves into the essential concepts of value realization within the context of app building in Airtable. As a Builder, it's crucial not only to identify the positive business outcomes you aim to achieve, but also to quantifiably prove the impact and ROI of your workflows. Throughout this course, you will learn how to articulate and measure the realized value and return on investment (ROI) of your Airtable projects.
Building for Product Operations: Whether you’re just getting started with Airtable’s ProductCentral, or considering that next step, this course can help you articulate the need for a dedicated Product Ops function and understand how Product Central supports the product lifecycle for your business.
Template Quick Starts: Airtable templates are ready-to-use apps that are fully customizable—and now they come with comprehensive tutorials to help you streamline your implementation and configuration for each template.
Templates with quick starts include:
🔁 Content Updates
Intro to Airtable learning path: Redesigned based on your feedback, this learning path now contains more bite-sized lessons and interactive tutorials.
Register for this learning path →
🚀 Product Launch Recap
Catch up on the latest features that launched this month—built to save you time, streamline workflows, and unlock new use cases.
Portals
Airtable Portals is now generally available for all customers! 🚀
Seamlessly collaborate with clients, vendors, and external partners without giving them full access to your workspace. With Portals, you can:
- Create branded sign-in experiences with your logo and custom background
- Control exactly what information external users can see and edit
- Scale affordably with guest seats that cost less than full Airtable licenses
- Maintain complete admin oversight of all external collaborators
Use cases:
- Client portals
- Vendor management workflows
- Customer support portal
Learn more about Portals here.
Multi-level Dropdown Filtering in Interface Designer
Any new List layout pages you create in Interface Designer now have a page-level hierarchy, allowing users to create dropdown filters on any table within the hierarchy.
Use cases:
- Filtering by region > team > individual
- Narrowing inventory categories
- Progressive task or project sorting
Learn more about this feature in the Knowledge Base article here.
Google Drive Sync (Document Content)
Previously, using Airtable's Google Drive sync, you could pull data from your Google Drive into Airtable: metadata, thumbnails, and links to files. Now, you can sync the content of the documents into an attachments column as well.
If you choose "Sync file content as attachment" when setting up your Google Drive sync, then when the sync runs, it will download the contents of your Google Drive docs and store them in an attachments field in Airtable.
Each time the sync runs, it will replace the attachment if there is a newer version available.
Native Google document types, such as Docs, Sheets, and Slides will be converted to an appropriate file format.
Once your files are stored in Airtable as attachments, you'll be able to analyze them using Airtable AI, send them via an email automation, or comment on them as part of your workflow.
Use cases:
- Auto-updating campaign briefs; syncing marketing copy with source docs
- Pulling in the latest legal or compliance documentation
- Event management; maintaining up-to-date 'Run of Show' doc
Learn more about this feature in the Knowledge Base article here.
Display External Images in Interfaces
This feature enables users to preview and display external image URLs (images hosted outside of Airtable) within Gallery layouts and Record Detail Pages, by adding the ability to render URL fields as images.
Use cases:
- Product visuals from your CDN
- User-submitted images
- Brand assets linked from a DAM
Learn more about this feature in the Knowledge Base article here.
Create New Records from Bulk Attachments Upload
You can now easily create new records in bulk in the base grid and gallery views by uploading attachments. Your table must have at least one attachment field in it.
To create new records from attachments:
- Drag-and-drop files onto the drop target at the bottom of the table
- Or click the "+" button in the grid view and select "Add records from attachments"
- If you have more than one attachment field, you'll select the field you want to upload into
- Your files will each be uploaded into a new record, and the name of the record will be the file name
If you're using Airtable AI, this is an easy way to get your docs into Airtable in order to extract information from them!
Use cases:
- Financial analysis; ingesting quarterly earnings PDFs from a folder
- Field marketing event photography, galleries, or archives
- Intake forms with multiple files
Field-Level Coloring for Number Fields
Builders now have the option to apply conditional color formatting to number fields on list and grid views in Interface Designer.
Use cases:
- Visualizing performance metrics
- Highlighting budget thresholds
- Tracking KPIs at a glance
View “What’s new in Airtable” →
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Did you find the Airtable Effect helpful? Any suggestions or recommendations for future editions? Want to learn more about the Airtable Academy and/or Community programs?
Or do you want to be featured in an upcoming rendition? Reach out on LinkedIn and/or tag me here in the Airtable Community (@kev) and show us what you're building in Airtable!
