I am making a base using the kanban view and it all looks good (on desktop), but when in the interface as a user I can’t edit any record content. The form is presented, but nothing can be edited. I am assuming this is just a setting not made correctly but I can’t see where editing should be permitted. This is using the free plan, and I am the only user/collaborator.
Which brings me to my bigger problem. The Kanban view barely works on a mobile device. It just presents a half-baked list, not as good as a grid (not tested if that works either). This applies whether the app is viewed in the browser or the AirTable app. All on iOS. Users (quite reasonably) expect lists with cards that can be moved around on their mobile device
For our use-case, it pretty much kills Airtable dead. In our world users are as likely to be on a mobile device as the desktop, possibly more likely. Any comments on how people address this problem or work around it would be welcome, or best of all tell me I am simply wrong and show me how to make the interface perform nicely (and faithfully mirror the desktop) when using a mobile phone.
Editing is controlled in the right margin of the interface. While you are in edit mode, if you click on the Kanban element, you’ll see the option to “Edit Records Inline” in the right margin.
Airtable was primarily designed to be a desktop app, so unfortunately, they don’t officially support any mobile web browsers at all. However, you can get SOME things to work within a mobile web browser by requesting to load the desktop site on your mobile browser. (“Loading the desktop site” is a feature that is built into mobile web browsers.) This is best for using Airtable’s grid view, though, because even if you load the desktop site on a mobile web browser, Airtable’s interfaces still won’t work 100% properly.
Airtable does offer limited mobile functionality within their Airtable mobile app. A few of their interfaces will work within their mobile app, but they won’t have the full functionality that you get on the desktop. For example, Airtable’s mobile app doesn’t support dragging-and-dropping kanban cards to different stacks. However, you can “zoom into” a card (i.e. “click into the record details”), and change its kanban stack that way. In order to enable this feature, back on your desktop machine in “Edit” mode, you will need to enable the option that says “Click into record details”. This is also in the right margin.
If you’d like to pay extra money to get a much better mobile experience for your Airtable systems, there are several tools out there that provide advanced interfaces/portals for Airtable that are extremely mobile-friendly and work in all mobile web browsers.
Scott, Very helpful reply, thanks. One question about, for example, noloco… if we have no prior systems deployed and no investment in Airtable, is there any benefit in linking the two systems. Why not just use it with native noloco tables or a more generic SQL database?