List your top Airtable feature requests here!

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What are your top Airtable feature requests?

I’ve got a list of 100+ feature requests, but I’ll start with just a few simple requests below:

  1. Column header title wrapping in grid view, so we can make columns narrow but still see the name of the field.

  2. Number fields: The ability to have commas in number fields, so large numbers like 1,823,298 don’t look like 1823298. Also, the ability for number fields to have international formatting (commas for decimal separators and periods for thousands separators).

  3. Automation error notifications: We should be able to specify who gets email notifications for automation errors. Right now, error messages get sent to the last person who “turned on” the automation. :man_facepalming:

  4. The ability to pay for more records & more automation runs, without having to pay $9,000+ per year for Enterprise. (And even enterprise has limits on records & automation runs, without the ability to pay for more records or more automation runs.)

  5. Linked record fields: When trying to link a record in a linked record field, we can currently only search linked record fields by the primary field value. We should be able to search by any field.

  6. Dynamic choices in linked record fields: Just like the functionality that we can enable in On2Air Forms and MiniExtensions, it would be amazing if we could have a dynamically-changing list of linked records to choose from, instead of showing ALL records from a single view or table. For example: If you have previously chosen a “U.S. State” in a previous field, when you get to the linked record field for “U.S. City”, that linked record field should ONLY show you a list of the U.S. Cities to choose from that are within the U.S. State that you previously chose. Same situation with choosing a “Vendor” in a previous field… by the time you get to the linked record field for “Vendor’s Product”, you should only see a list of that particular vendor’s product to choose from. Same thing with “Company” and “Contact From This Company”, “Employee” and “Client Attached To This Employee”, etc. etc. etc. There are hundreds of examples of this. MiniExtensions and On2Air Forms both handle this very well, but Airtable doesn’t offer this capability at all.

  7. Duplicating records in bulk: The ability to select many records at once, and then duplicate all of them by right-clicking on them.

  8. Captchas on forms to reduce spam.

  9. Kanbans: The ability to group stacks by formula fields. We wouldn’t have the ability to drag-and-drop between stacks, but that’s okay.

  10. Sync tables via API: The ability to instantly trigger a sync via the API.

  11. Conditionally-colored cells and manually-colored cells: All spreadsheet apps have always had this functionality, but it’s not available in Airtable. We need the ability to color our cells, both manually and conditionally.

  12. Automatic backlinks to linked records within the same table: Airtable automatically creates backlinks to records that are linked across multiple tables, but it doesn’t create backlinks of records that are linked within the same table.

Please chime in below with your own feature requests! :smiley:

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Another one from me:

  • Interfaces: I have a ton of requests for interfaces, but yesterday, my client needed the ability to move an “interface page” from one “interface group” into another “interface group”. This wasn’t possible, so she had to recreate her entire interface page from scratch.

EDIT: It looks like a workaround for this missing feature is to DUPLICATE an existing interface page. When you duplicate an existing interface page, it gives you the choice of duplicating it into a different interface group.

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Document creation, like Notion

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Let developers use third-party libraries in their code.

Better still, let them create their own libraries that can be reused in any of Airtable’s script environments.

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I’ve managed to get (2) by selecting a currency field, and erasing the currency symbol.
But I agree it should be a standard feature of the number field.

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Welcome to the community, @nicodeceulaer! :smiling_face:

Thanks for mentioning that great number trick! :sunglasses: I forgot to mention it above, and I even showed it off near the end of this episode of the BuiltOnAir Airtable podcast.

I’ve discovered that this trick works best in a number element in interfaces, because interfaces don’t show the symbol that represents the field. In the normal grid view, Airtable always shows the dollar sign in the column header, which confused one of my clients. However, a possible compromise would be to create a formula field that results in currency… but then you end up with 2 fields.

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Another feature request:

  • Sorting records in automations: Many of Airtable’s automation actions, including the new looping actions, will return records in a random & unpredictable order. What Airtable really needs in their automations is a “Sort Records” action.
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Yeah, this situation crept up on me yesterday when deciding if it made sense to create my new interface as a part of my current group or if it needed to be in its own. It’s too early in development to know the long term implications so I’m just hoping my choice doesn’t come back to bite me later.

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Yeah, it’s strange that Airtable give us no flexibility to move an interface page after it’s been created. Some of these interfaces could take a very long time to recreate from scratch.

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The ability to see which form was used to submit data in the Revision history.

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Never understood why this is not already available - and seems so basic to me - and I have been banging on about it for ages, but…

More date formatting options on the date field.

Would love at least to be able to add the weekday (ie Monday). Please don’t suggest using a DATETIME_FORMAT formula! That then only sorts alphabetically - not chronologically.

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Yeah, this is a very glaring feature that is seriously missing. The only clunky workaround is to create a formula field that always starts with the year/month first, and then you can put the name of the day AFTER that. Not very elegant nor user friendly. And it creates clutter by requiring another field, too.

Yes, that would be awesome! I’ve had a few clients who have really needed this!

At least they finally gave us 2 workarounds for this so we can tag the records ourselves in an additional field (by either using prefilled hidden fields or using an automation trigger that is tied to the specific form itself), but they come with big downsides: they have to be setup ahead of time; the prefilled form trick can be easily broken by the user modifying the URL; and we only have 50 automations so we can easily run out of automations if we have a lot of forms to keep track of.

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I do that a lot - am constantly being asked by users “why does the date look like that??” Really can’t be bothered to explain anymore!!

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  • Sorting Linked Record Fields: When configuring a linked record field, we should have an additional field option that allows us to automatically sort the linked records by a specified field in the linked record table. For example, this would enable us to always have the most recent linked record appear at the top of the linked record field.
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My big one for Interfaces:

The ability to create and duplicate records inside a linked record grid without any workarounds, as none that I’ve tried have proven themselves to be fast/nonintrusive enough.

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Welcome to the community, @mdmtr!

Yeah, that’s strange that they don’t offer a native way to duplicate a record or linked record within interfaces.

Although creating new linked records operates the same way that it does in the normal grid view… which part of creating linked records do you not like?

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Lately I’ve been wanting a method of being able to write either Scripting App Extensions or Automation Scripting actions within VS Code. It’s very annoying having to move in-and-out of the two environments to get both data and logic working - and considering the ecosystem of extensions available to VS Code - it’s not going away any time soon.

But regarding features,

I really just wanted support for pre-filtered Link Field returns, where we have the ability to tie a Link Field to the value of another field in the same table, that also links up with a counter-part field in the Link Field target base. Interestingly enough, I was able to code this very feature within the Scripting App (begrudgingly with some hardcoded Views) - but I’m still holding my breath to see this feature added as core feature. If there’s a real concern of how this might break things, then Airtable could just introduce a new type of Column.

Another thing I’m needing, is the ability to return the field names used within each view. I still can’t believe I can’t do this, and if I’m doing clever-trickery with Views then I have to hard-code in the Views fields, rather than just pull the field names from the configured View. So for example;
console.log(table.getView(“Grid view”)) - This should also return an array of visible field names/ids within that view.

I’d like to see some work on the Record Picker element within an interface - where it can be either hidden (but still functioning with its default behaviour for loading records) - but realistically, I’d like the Field Element for a Linked Field to behave itself just like the Record Picker. So I can select a record within the Link Field and then see the sub-fields propagate in my interface (just like they do with the Record Picker).

More control over whitespace in Interfaces, Kanban View and Gantt View.

A total revamp and extra features that have been requested for years and years for the Kanban View and Gantt View. Including the ability to empower users with displaying colours where they would like to see them, and hiding elements when conditions are/are not met.

For Form Views, the ability to pre-check data entry - for example, preventing users from entering in symbols, numbers, or text in Text fields. Maximum and minimum on Number fields - there are countless pre-checks needed for Form Views - and the workaround of post processing form data via Automation completely sucks - as it doesn’t educate the user (the person entering in their data) on what’s actually needed.

And finally for Form Views, the ability for multiple input columns, and coloured regions.

OMG I wish I never found this thread! :joy: I guess I now live here. Hi, welcome to my new home, let me show you around. :house_with_garden:

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@Karlstens

Great list of feature requests!

Funny, this was one of my very first posts in the old Airtable community forum (before that forum got retired). Coming from the world of FileMaker where relationships between tables & records are automatically generated, I was completely baffled by the need for manual linking in Airtable. (Although this isn’t just a FileMaker thing — I’m pretty sure that all database programming languages do automatic linking of relationships.)

Absolutely! This is such a huge & glaring omission from the product! And the biggest one for my clients is validation of actual email addresses in email fields! We’ve had so many automations fail because an email address was not entered properly into a form.

One thing that I’d like to add to this request for field validations is that all of these field validations should ALSO apply to the normal Airtable views & interfaces as well!

In other words, a field validation should always be a field validation no matter where that field appears — whether that field appears on a form, a grid view, a gallery view, an interface, etc. The field validation should be attached to the field itself.

You can do any sort of a field validation that you would like in FileMaker — check out how comprehensive their field validations are in the screenshot below. They’ve got a whole bunch of quick & easy options for you to choose right off the bat, but that “validated by calculation” checkbox lets you create any sort of insanely-complicated formulas that you would like validate your data entry.

FileMaker Field Validations
FileMaker Field Validations1264×1264 142 KB

Hahaha! Welcome!! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I don’t think I saw this above:

  • When “Grouping By” a multi-select or linked record field with multiple values, an option to use each individual value as a group (even if it means that a record shows up more than once) rather than the current behavior of using each in-use combination of values as a heading.
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