11/14/2023 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S16-E07

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The BuiltOnAir Podcast is Sponsored by On2Air – Integrations and App extensions to run your business operations in Airtable.

In This Episode

Welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast, the live show.  The BuiltOnAir Podcast is a live weekly show highlighting everything happening in the Airtable world.

Check us out at BuiltOnAir.com. Join our community, join our Slack Channel, and meet your fellow Airtable fans.

Todays Hosts

Kamille Parks – I am an Airtable Community Forums Leader and the developer behind the custom Airtable app “Scheduler”, one of the winning projects in the Airtable Custom Blocks Contest now widely available on the Marketplace. I focus on building simple scripts, automations, and custom apps for Airtable that streamline data entry and everyday workflows.

Dan Fellars – I am the Founder of Openside, On2Air, and BuiltOnAir. I love automation and software. When not coding the next feature of On2Air, I love spending time with my wife and kids and golfing.

Scott Rose – Scott Rose is an expert Airtable consultant, a Certified FileMaker Developer, and a Registered Integromat Partner with 30 years of database development experience. Scott is the Chief Geek Officer of ScottWorld.com, where he has built a career developing world-class database systems for businesses. Scott is also a member of MENSA International (the high IQ society) and is an accomplished public speaker. In the early 2000’s, Scott traveled around the country for 6 years with Steve Jobs & the Apple Executive Team as one of Apple’s top professional speakers. Scott spoke at all of Apple’s major events & retail store openings, where he introduced many of Apple’s new products to the public for the very first time. In his free time, Scott gives motivational & inspirational talks at conferences around the globe.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:01:40 –

An App a Day – 00:01:41 –

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the Calendly App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Jen Rudd will walk through how to integrate Airtable and Calendly for your scheduling needs.”.

View App

A Case for Interface – 00:01:42 –

Explore Interfaces with “New Interface Forms”.

Kamille will walk through how to use the new Forms in Interfaces.

Field Focus – 00:01:43 –

A deep dive into the Global Fields – Scott will walk through a technique to create global fields 

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:01:40

Roundup of what’s happening in the Airtable communities – Airtable, BuiltOnAir, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Segment: An App a Day

Start Time: 00:01:41

Airtable App Showcase – Calendly – Jen Rudd will walk through how to integrate Airtable and Calendly for your scheduling needs.

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the Calendly App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Jen Rudd will walk through how to integrate Airtable and Calendly for your scheduling needs.”.

View App

Segment: A Case for Interface

Start Time: 00:01:42

New Interface Forms

Explore Interfaces with “New Interface Forms”.

Kamille will walk through how to use the new Forms in Interfaces.

Segment: Field Focus

Start Time: 00:01:43

Learn about the Global Fields – Scott will walk through a technique to create global fields

A deep dive into the Global Fields – Scott will walk through a technique to create global fields 

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Built On Air Podcast, the variety show for all things Airtable. In each episode, we cover four different segments. It's always fresh and different, and lots of fun. While you get the insider info on all things Airtable, our hosts and guests are some of the most senior experts in the Airtable community.

[00:00:26] Join us live each week on our YouTube channel every Tuesday at 11:00 AM Eastern and join our active [email protected]. Before we begin, a word from our sponsor on.

[00:00:37] On2Air Backups provides automated Airtable backups to your cloud storage for secure and reliable data protection. Prevent data loss and set up a secure Airtable backup system with On2Air Backups at on2air. com. 

[00:00:50] As one customer, Sarah, said, Having automated Airtable backups has freed up hours of my time every other week. And the fear of losing anything. Long time customer [00:01:00] David states, OntoAir Backups might be the most critical piece of the puzzle to guard against unforeseeable disaster. 

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[00:01:37] Dan Fellars: Welcome to the Built On Air podcast. We are in season 16, episode 7. Good to be back with you. We've got a whole gang of regular hosts and guests with us today. Myself, Dan Fellers, Kamille Parks back with us and Jen Rudd also joining a regular face with us. Welcome back, Jen. Thank you for having me. Good [00:02:00] to be with you.

[00:02:01] And Scott Rose, our regular fill in joining us back again. Welcome again, 

[00:02:05] Scott Rose: Scott. Thank you so much. Great to see you guys. 

[00:02:09] Dan Fellars: Great. We've got another great episode for you. I'll walk through what we're going to be doing. We'll start with our around the basis of keeping you up to date. There was some big news this week that we're going to be talking about.

[00:02:21] Then we'll give a shout out to On2Air Backups, our primary sponsor. Then Jen's going to walk through integrating with Calendly. And then Kamille's going to walk through the new interface forms that just launched. And then a shout out to Join Our Community. And then Scott Rose is going to walk us through how to build global fields in the base.

[00:02:44] ROUND THE BASES - 00:02:45

[00:02:46] So with that... We'll start with the big announcement, new features released. Let's see, what do we got? So we've got a streamlined customization. [00:03:00] So mostly, I think everything was in interfaces. So they changed the layout of how you edit things, um, in the interface and then they separated, I guess this was the one I'm thinking of the, the navigation from the page properties.

[00:03:19] So they cleaned up, um, that they redesigned the properties panel, similar, uh, enhancement. And then they moved, or they added forms into interfaces, which we'll be digging into. They also improved some sharing functionality, company wide sharing, and a few other things, also a list of coming soon features.

[00:03:48] Thoughts, impressions of the updates this week, 

[00:03:52] Scott Rose: you know, my favorite thing. Oh, I'm sorry, Kamille. Did I cut you off? No. Um, I, you know, one of my favorite things about this was that they moved the page [00:04:00] navigation from the right where it was hidden, uh, over to the left where it's, uh, where it should be and where it's also, uh, not hidden anymore.

[00:04:10] Uh, it used to be on the right and you could only get to it by clicking on a little tiny thing that said all pages. And then it showed up. But now, as you can see in that screenshot, you're showing there, it's that white bar on the left, so it's where you would expect it to be. And you can hide that panel and, um, it's just so much more accessible now.

[00:04:34] Jen Rudd: I find the page properties a little confusing now because you basically have to click on the list element to change the field and so forth. So there's a lot more clicking to change just the layout of the pages. Once you've gotten the page added navigation, that makes sense. Like, it's more clicky to get what you need on the page.

[00:04:59] Kamille Parks: I think it [00:05:00] depends on what you're clicking on because 1 of the things that they've added was like, in the screenshot that they have, they it's a full page list view. If you wanted to add a field to, um. To that list view, you would like between where it says name and I can't see the name of the other column, but the single select there would be a blue plus button in between them.

[00:05:24] And you could just click that and say, which field you want to appear there. So you don't have to like, dig through a side panel to be like, okay, add a field. Um, to this particular group or to this particular tab or something. So they've added the ability to click directly on the canvas to add various different things.

[00:05:42] And that's nice. It's not a hundred percent universal. So where it says creative project slash projects, that's like the title of the page. I don't think you can click there to rename the projects page. So that's an example of, it's [00:06:00] not. Implement it everywhere. But it is, you know, if you wanted to add another button next to add project, you would just click a blue button that would appear there.

[00:06:08] So I think that's nice. I'm not sold on having the pages sidebar next to the real sidebar that appears in your interface. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like you could have just used the one that was already there. And like, when you're editing unhide the unpublished ones, um, 

[00:06:32] Scott Rose: it should be merged together as 

[00:06:34] Kamille Parks: 1.

[00:06:35] Yeah, I completely agree with Scott that. I'm glad that it's no longer buried. Um, underneath like, you couldn't look at the properties of your list view and look at all of your pages at once. But I do think it's a little weird to have 2 sidebars right next to each 

[00:06:54] Dan Fellars: other. Are these clickable, the inner ones?

[00:06:58] Does it chain? Are they, do they [00:07:00] stay in sync? Are they, I 

[00:07:01] Scott Rose: don't, oh, I don't know. I think while you're editing, it will still navigate the page.

[00:07:09] I can test that, but I, I just remember thinking it just, it felt a little like extra to, 

[00:07:16] it 

[00:07:19] Kamille Parks: will navigate you. 

[00:07:21] Scott Rose: Oh, it did. You just test. Nice. I just 

[00:07:24] Kamille Parks: feel like it could have been 

[00:07:25] Scott Rose: one. Yes. Yes. They're getting so much closer to making it one. It was on the right. Now it's on the left. It's so close. The next update, they've got to merge them.

[00:07:37] It's funny, they make, they roll these things out live. These changes. I was actually, this is so funny. I was working with a client live on a zoom call, building an interface with her. And as she was moving her mouse on the screen, the pages thing jumped from the right to the left. Wow. Rolled out while we were doing it.

[00:07:58] Kamille Parks: Yeah, that's crazy. [00:08:00] 

[00:08:00] Jen Rudd: Yeah. Especially with like your, I feel like we're always building interfaces with clients nowadays where you build it in real time to think through their workflow. And it's, it's very interesting to see how the things change, especially cause like on Friday we talked about it this way and then on Tuesday, the following week is a totally different layout, like just forget everything.

[00:08:17] Kamille Parks: It's so 

[00:08:17] Scott Rose: true. It's so true. 

[00:08:21] Kamille Parks: I do think the, the reception to this batch of changes has been largely positive. I don't think I've seen anyone, you know, particularly up in arms or even like even negative. Um, I think a lot of it was like, Oh yeah, that kind of makes sense. Apart from the, the double left hand sidebar, you can hide it.

[00:08:42] So, um, where it says pages and it has the hamburger icon, you can collapse that sidebar. So it is, it's not like it's always there. So, on the whole, I think most people are, like, relatively positive for this batch of changes and the coming soon, um, [00:09:00] list that was mentioned, um, in this post is, um, I think pretty exciting for a lot of people.

[00:09:07] Um, my two ones, my coworkers are probably sick, sick to death of me complaining about there not being a pivot table element. They're going to put one in. Yay.

[00:09:21] Dan Fellars: Port for us Android users. 

[00:09:26] Scott Rose: And I think a lot of people have been asking for, uh, form validations. So it's interesting that they're going to be building some sort of form validation into these interface forms. 

[00:09:36] Kamille Parks: Yeah. And I do wonder how much, um, control we're going to get the, the simple, um, validations are like the number can't be more than 50 or the text can't be more than 300 characters.

[00:09:50] That's simple and easy, but I think a lot of people are looking for validation. Like, um, I can already say, don't show me. [00:10:00] Linked records, unless my email or my user is tagged to that record, but I think it's the extra step of like, not necessarily tagging me as a person in a collaborator field or using my email anywhere on the record itself, but just saying Kamille is only interested in these things and Scott is only interested in these things globally.

[00:10:24] Like if you're the CEO, you're not going to assign yourself as the CEO to every. Record in your base, right? Things like that, that are like global kind of validation things to check on and all that kind of stuff. So they could go a couple of different ways. I'm expecting at least the bare minimum, like the numbers between these ranges, types of validations, at least in the first 

[00:10:49] Scott Rose: batch.

[00:10:50] Yeah, you know what you were just talking about? It's very cool. You can do that with the fill out forms. Yeah. Which is such a cool [00:11:00] app. Like, I don't know how it flew under the radar for so long. Or maybe it's maybe it's really new. It's pretty new. It's new. Okay. 

[00:11:10] Jen Rudd: Yeah, I use it a ton now just because it's just very flexible.

[00:11:14] It'll add new values to drop down things like that as you add other. So it's pretty cool and plugged in their table. So 

[00:11:22] Kamille Parks: I want to be able to edit what was that? I want a form to be able to edit records, not just create new ones. And now that, you know, they're kind of moving forms into the interface world.

[00:11:35] I'm unsure why that is not tackled. 

[00:11:40] Dan Fellars: I think part of it is their pricing model, right? Cause They don't want to make it easy to edit records without paying for a subscription. 

[00:11:50] Kamille Parks: You could lock that off. If you, if you made a toggle, that's like this form only creates records or it edits existing records. And you could turn [00:12:00] that toggle off if you don't have, you know, the team's plan or whatever, if they really want to go that route, fine.

[00:12:09] But like, I want to be able to edit things a little bit more. 

[00:12:13] Scott Rose: It's crazy because that feel like is that for free? Exactly. Yeah, you can edit up to 1000 times a month for free.

[00:12:24] Dan Fellars: So 1 thing I'll mention before we move on. That's not mentioned in here. That is new is probably because this is for kind of existing customers, but for new customers. Well, actually. I think it's anytime you create. No, I guess it's the new workflow for new users. It walks them. There's a new, uh, onboarding flow and it walks you through building an entire app with interfaces and it, and it just makes it easy to, and it automatically create tables based off of what you're trying to do 

[00:12:55] Jen Rudd: and some automations too.

[00:12:58] I've seen that. [00:13:00] I actually did out of it because I was in a meeting today, but it does like when you create a new base is the new user automatically puts you into the app building 

[00:13:07] Dan Fellars: experience. So it is for any new base that you create. So, that'd be interesting. It kind of like, especially for new users. I think that's cool.

[00:13:18] It might be annoying for for power users, but you can skip out of it. You can just start from scratch and start blank. So a couple, um, so this is the, this is the thread from the built on air community talking about, um, some of the coming soon items and some discussion on there, what they might mean, um, and we'll talk more about interface forms, what they allow, what they don't allow.

[00:13:48] But, uh, good discussion there. Um, next one. So this was kind of. A fallout to some of the changes. Um, [00:14:00] this was kind of on the downside. Russell points out that, um, it used to be easier to, to create a new field from the interfaces. And at first Russell thought that they removed it completely. But it got buried into the, the plus, um, kind of the dot, dot, dot section.

[00:14:21] Scott Rose: Oh, yeah, I was looking for that. There it 

[00:14:23] Dan Fellars: is. Yeah, 

[00:14:25] Kamille Parks: I think the problem is if you have a lot of fields, or if you have multiple, uh, uh, groups on your page that Add field that we're seeing in this screenshot is so far down. You don't see it. Um, it might be helpful for that to appear at the bottom of each group.

[00:14:42] So then it's, it's more surface, but you can, like I was saying before, click directly on the page in the interface and it, you'll be able to pick from existing fields or create a new one from there. So it's still present, but it is more buried. 

[00:14:57] Dan Fellars: So, yeah, if you're used to doing [00:15:00] things, things are going to move.

[00:15:01] Hopefully they start to, you know, firm up where there isn't a ton of changes 

[00:15:08] Scott Rose: going on. Oh, you know what I was going to tell you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I was going to tell Kamille earlier when you were talking about the two different vertical, you know, navigation panes on the left. Um, it was so funny the other day I was, I wanted to duplicate a page and I was hovering over the name of the page and I was like, where did the duplicate function is gone?

[00:15:30] Where did they put it? And I was on the blue and not the white. 

[00:15:33] Kamille Parks: See, you don't need to just use the one you already have. Yeah, 

[00:15:38] Scott Rose: exactly. 

[00:15:41] Kamille Parks: Muscle memory. 

[00:15:43] Jen Rudd: That's the hardest. It's like, I usually do it this way and voila. And now it's like, Oh, I got to figure out where that is now. So I can't, can't do it as fast.

[00:15:51] Kamille Parks: And as is the nature with Airtable, they'll add features in one place that used to be over here and sometimes like one [00:16:00] feature just sort of slips through the cracks and it doesn't migrate for whatever reason. Um, It's, it's my favorite example, but button fields don't have, uh, access to the color teal everywhere else in the platform, except for button fields, because it just, it slipped through the cracks.

[00:16:18] I guess 

[00:16:20] Scott Rose: we need teal buttons. Period. I, 

[00:16:22] Kamille Parks: yeah, I won't stop until it's resolved. 

[00:16:27] Scott Rose: Scott, I'm behind you. Kamille, you have my. Complete blessing on this.

[00:16:36] Dan Fellars: Alright, moving on. Here's a different, uh, different topic. Um, so this is from the Reddit community talking about Gantt charts and why they don't do this simple trick. Um, so basically, frustrating simple change could drastically improve Gantt chart usability. So to kind of give a sense of what they're talking about, um, [00:17:00] in this image, this is what it looks like in Airtable.

[00:17:04] So these two items are only like an hour apart. Hmm. But it looks like they're a day apart. Hmm. Um, and so that's how it just layers things and he gives a good, um, example of what it looks like in a different Gantt tool. Where it just layers them on top of each other if they're the same day. So he's like, why doesn't air table do it this way?

[00:17:32] Oh, yeah, 

[00:17:35] Kamille Parks: that's me. Yeah, that's a great point. I. I don't know if it's true, but I feel like Airtable gave up on the Gantt chart because they've been like really gung ho about the timeline view, which is pretty useful. I used it a lot, but Gantt view was never, um, you know, implemented in interfaces, [00:18:00] whereas basically every other view was, um, And I think some features that started off in Gantt view were added to both versions of the, uh, the timeline, uh, view and interface page type, but they haven't touched the Gantt view that I've noticed in well over a year.

[00:18:21] And so either they're quietly working on. Improvements to Gantt chart, um, which will make its way into interfaces, probably, or they'll never look at it again. But if you look at the, um, interface updates, announcement posts, the coming soon, um, What a couple of the things that they said they were working on.

[00:18:47] It's at the bottom and they're coming soon. Task management improvements and resource allocation modules. I feel like resource allocation module feels timeline related and task management improvements feels [00:19:00] Gant and if it's time for yet another characteristically bad prediction from myself. Let's just say, hey, maybe they'll, they'll add Gantt like functionality.

[00:19:12] Um, but yeah, yeah, I don't know. The Gantt 

[00:19:18] Jen Rudd: chart functionality of resolving, um, discrepancies is not in timeline. It just visually lets you see the overlap and doesn't show you the dependencies properly or resolve inaccuracies. 

[00:19:30] Kamille Parks: Mm hmm. Or even having dedicated, um, swim lanes, if you will, where each record is its own rather than like stacking.

[00:19:38] Um, so it's not a one to one, um, although some features are present in both, it, it isn't a perfect, you know, replacement. So I, I agree with that user that that would be very useful for, um, things that happen. Right next to each other in time. 

[00:19:57] Dan Fellars: Bill French. Welcome watching said. [00:20:00] I warned them about data visualization back in 2018.

[00:20:03] It will never make customers happy because data visualization satisfaction for all customers is unachievable. 

[00:20:10] Kamille Parks: It certainly is. They could try. 

[00:20:16] Scott Rose: You know, I hate to always push people towards these third party solutions, but Dan, if you go in our private chat there, there's a link to the no loco interfaces and their Gantt charts, I believe do the stacking properly, but that is a paid external add on, you know, you're leaving the air table.

[00:20:33] You know, app, yeah, switch to a different 

[00:20:37] Kamille Parks: app, but it's always good to look at how other platforms are doing these kind of, uh, data visualization stuff because air tables, not Tableau, right? You're not going to ever get advanced charts and like deep. Meaningful reporting out of it without tearing your hair out.

[00:20:57] The little stuff, you know, [00:21:00] Airtable nor, nor, no loco invented the Gantt chart. It's to learn from each other on what's the best way to, you know, improve it. And make little tweaks over time because they've heavily invested in timeline, but no other view has really gotten that same kind of attention except for forms.

[00:21:20] Now, I guess

[00:21:24] Dan Fellars: that's why I keep pushing for embeddable extensions where people can create their own custom extension with the data and then you can create your own Gantt chart. That's exactly what you want. Yep. Hopefully someday. All right. One more. This is from the built on air community. Uh, Ben Bailey starts a thread about right once read many and I'm talking about the need for something where you can edit a field just one time and then lock it in at that point so that it's not changeable afterwards [00:22:00] and kind of the pros and cons of of different approaches to that and what works and what doesn't.

[00:22:08] So kind of asking for it. Maybe best practices on how to deal with that

[00:22:15] comments. There 

[00:22:19] Kamille Parks: there is a new.

[00:22:24] I was just 

[00:22:25] Jen Rudd: going to say, there's another thing that came up just very recently. I just found, or someone posted in the Slack channel too. Yeah, it's interesting. 

[00:22:32] Kamille Parks: So 

[00:22:35] Scott Rose: a lot of these features that we've been talking about today, like the validations coming to forms and you know, will the, you know, how complex will those be?

[00:22:43] Then this, uh, write once, read many. It's funny cause I come from a database background with FileMaker, very, very advanced. Platform that had all these features built in. So it's interesting to see air table slowly starting to add these features in to get it more and more [00:23:00] advanced. It would be nice for them to be able to have this.

[00:23:02] Capability because I could see how that would be very useful in many cases,

[00:23:09] but they are inching along, you know With more and more advanced features slowly over time 

[00:23:16] Dan Fellars: I put one more on the list. We can add it to the table forums list of feature requests 

[00:23:23] Scott Rose: Ah, yes 

[00:23:25] Dan Fellars: All right, last item, interface add ons. So this is from a screenshot of the newsletter that Airtable sends out. And this picture, and it has these add ons options for asset production.

[00:23:44] Speculation. CKamille make another prediction. Whatever 

[00:23:48] Kamille Parks: that time to shine, baby. Um, if we all recall air table announced apps by air table, which is effectively like more [00:24:00] thorough templates, I guess. My guess is that that's what those add ons are just because they seem very specific. Um, their 

[00:24:10] Jen Rudd: automations, their predictive 

[00:24:12] Kamille Parks: automations.

[00:24:13] Ah, Well, there you go. 

[00:24:15] Dan Fellars: But it's probably like a collection of an automation 

[00:24:19] Jen Rudd: plus. Yeah. Cause it asks you when you build the app, like how to do like what you're trying to do. And it's like, what use case. And then also like, do you want to send updates to something? So they basically build the automation and prefilled the fields for you.

[00:24:31] Based on 

[00:24:32] Kamille Parks: what I 

[00:24:33] Dan Fellars: saw yesterday. Yeah, gotcha. So it's probably, it's basically a collection of tables, fields, automation, interface elements. So a plug and play template 

[00:24:45] Kamille Parks: that's modified by user input. Yeah, so it like asks you 

[00:24:53] Jen Rudd: what you're trying to accomplish and then like, are you sending these kinds of updates or doing this kind of data cleaning?

[00:24:59] If [00:25:00] so, it'll turn those on for you. All right, 

[00:25:02] Dan Fellars: interesting the hope was that it could be, uh, um, extensions, but it's that 

[00:25:11] Kamille Parks: I, I understand why the option is placed there. Because they're, they're pushing hard for interfaces, right, is the way in which people interact with your Airtable. And so putting the add on option there is kind of like, all right, now add the part where you're, um, collecting user input somewhere in the app that you're building.

[00:25:40] But yeah, the, from its placement, it does kind of lead one to believe, oh, maybe they're adding extensions. Because it's separated out like that, so I'm sure it's going to disappoint a lot of people. 

[00:25:59] Dan Fellars: This [00:26:00] also, to our original discussion, this also is an argument to having two sidebars because you have pages here, add ons, forms, all on this sidebar.

[00:26:11] Kamille Parks: I will say that does make more sense. Uh, because in, in the, in the interface I was building when I first saw that this change, I didn't have any forms, nor did I have any add ons. So I was just like, why do I have 2? What's up with that? This, this does make more sense.

[00:26:30] Dan Fellars: Well, that, uh, concludes our round the bases and everything going on. So exciting new, um, updates. I also think the, these updates kind of lay a foundation for. For more to come. So excited to see what else they they add on 

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[00:27:24] AN APP A DAY - CALENDLY WITH JEN RUDD - 00:27:27

[00:27:28] With that Calendly Jen's going to do some integration work with us.

[00:27:32] There you go. 

[00:27:35] Jen Rudd: I did want to show before we went into Calendly, the cool new 

[00:27:39] Kamille Parks: option. Oh yeah. We revealed 

[00:27:44] Dan Fellars: primary field. Yeah. Yeah, 

[00:27:46] Kamille Parks: that's been, I can't remember if we covered that. 

[00:27:48] Jen Rudd: Did you cover it last week? I don't remember. I saw someone posted it in Slack. I 

[00:27:52] Dan Fellars: think it's been, that's been around for a month maybe.

[00:27:57] Jen Rudd: Okay, that makes sense because now you, in [00:28:00] the interfaces, you can hide the primary fields and lists and so forth. So that would make sense. Sounds slow to the party. . 

[00:28:08] Kamille Parks: It's very cool. Well, you, how often are you reconfiguring your primary field, though? So I, a lot of people just didn't, 

[00:28:16] Dan Fellars: or, or watching the Built on Air podcast,

[00:28:18] Kamille Parks: Yeah. 

[00:28:19] Jen Rudd: You know, I, I try to listen in the background. It doesn't matter. You're speaking of things that are probably gonna go away eventually. We're, we're talking about using extensions in the data set today.

[00:28:37] I am trying as much as possible to get rid of third parties as Zapier and make obviously there's sometimes when you want to use make and Zapier, but for the most part, I'm trying to figure out ways to dump these third party tools for a specific use cases. So, like, right now, my Zapier does 2 things. It pulls new zoom links for me, and it marks when I have a Calendly discovery calls [00:29:00] in my table, so I'm down to 1 thing left in Zapier.

[00:29:04] So what I did was I figured out how to get information from CalME when someone books a call or even cancels a call. And I found out that you can actually subscribe to webhooks in Calendly. So a subscription to webhooks is just basically understanding, um, having another tool to send information to a webhook to, um, hi, Erica.

[00:29:27] Uh, so send information to a webhook, um, which you can then process in Airtable. So Airtable, one of the triggers is a webhook. So basically, the Calendly can send information to a URL, which you can then process in Airtable for free. Very specific non development speak so in Calendly in order to get this webhook to send information, you have to register the webhook.

[00:29:50] And you would think it'd be straightforward. You just go into Calumny and put your webhook. Doesn't like that. You have to send it through the API. So the first thing you have to do in Calumny [00:30:00] is get an API key. So just like in Airtable, um, Calumny has personal access tokens, which are specifically scoped to send information.

[00:30:09] So it gives you a 75, um, character, uh, personal access token, which you use then calumny and sort of once you give it the, um, personal access token, you're using that to figure out what the organizational ID of your county account is because you need that. To send information to Calendly to say, were this account in Calendly, which is not like your Grow with Jen or Rut Consulting ID, it's like some, another weird string, you have to send that string and the webhook that you want information.

[00:30:45] To Calendly and say, for this organization, send information to this exact, um, web hook so that we can process the information. So basically I have a script in Airtable and the scripting app, which says [00:31:00] basically to first go get your web hook id, um, your, your personal access token. And then the next piece is to go to Calendly and say, tell me what this personal access tokens organization is.

[00:31:14] And so once you put that information in, it returns the organization. Then you can process that, as well as the webhook that you want to send information to in Airtel. So that's basically what this code does. And then, so I have an automation that I built in Airtable, which basically says, when a webhook from Calendly is received, go find that person in my CRM, because essentially you would think most of the time people come through a lead capture form when they book in Calendly and they come back and we update their information in Airtable to say that they've booked the discovery call, and if they don't exist yet, Um, in this year, and then we create a record for them and put the discovery call date if they haven't, if they already exist, and we go and update and then we also process information because Cal and me were [00:32:00] subscribing to both.

[00:32:01] New, um, new events books and also canceled events because we want to make sure that we have a way to follow up with them. They don't end up, um, making the discovery call. So 

[00:32:14] Kamille Parks: the first script registers your webhook with Calendly and then the automation is like, now that it's been registered. Each time someone schedules an appointment or cancels update that information in your table.

[00:32:30] Jen Rudd: Exactly. So the first piece we're just doing it one time. So we're doing it in the extension block because it's not a consistent thing. And then yes, once, once that's a web host description that's set up, then we have the Airtable automation to process those bookings. So what it looks like basically is we're going to grab this webhook ID.

[00:32:49] And I'm going to save it over here along with, I already pulled my personal access token. So this really simple script, [00:33:00] you run it, you put in your personal access token, you can see it's ridiculously long. And then here's the first response, which returns the ID for the organization, which is this string here.

[00:33:19] We have to pass that as well as the webhook into Calendly to register the webhook. If this isn't information that you can find on the back end of Calendly, you have to send in your personal access token to get that information. Then I just have an automation and the trigger is a webhook. And so I grabbed this webhook

[00:33:45] and I'm gonna have to run it again. This is why I saved it to, uh, control C. Live demos are 

[00:33:53] Dan Fellars: always fun. 

[00:33:56] Jen Rudd: But I saw, I tested, I tested it early this morning. Um, [00:34:00] and so basically it says that the webhook subscription actually works. We can test it by making the booking. But I wanted to show you more how the data comes in.

[00:34:11] So when the webhook is received, Here's the body. And so you can just dig through the payload to see how the information comes in. So, like, even if I was to give you the space, you couldn't copy all of the automation. So you have to kind of, like, rebuild the automation. So it's really understanding, like, the status is canceled.

[00:34:31] We would want to make sure that we process the cancels differently than the books and so forth. And then also you figure out, like, the questions and answers. So if we ask questions. In the Calendly booking, and then also picking up the start date and end date and so forth, and you can also pick the name of the Calendly appointment.

[00:34:51] So you can sort of process and do different workflows based on what information is coming, but you see, once that webhook is registered, you get a ton of information about every single booking or [00:35:00] cancellation in Calendly, which is a little bit different than what Zapier does. It kind of gives you like, Maybe 10 or 15, maybe 10 different points where this gives you like all the information.

[00:35:12] That was cool. It took a while to get the fact that you had to get the organization first and then pass through that information. Cause I tried just putting like grow with Jen and it's like, I don't know what that is. So working through scripts in general, it's kind of interesting to see both like how other tools want the information and then how to pass it through in a way that makes sense without asking the user to put a ton of information.

[00:35:33] And that interface with script. 

[00:35:36] Dan Fellars: Very cool. I thought it was fun.

[00:35:43] Useful way to connect directly with a Calendly. 

[00:35:48] Jen Rudd: Now we're just down to zoom and I'm sure I can figure that 

[00:35:50] Kamille Parks: one out too.

[00:35:54] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Jen, for sharing that. And, um, [00:36:00] it's cool to see. I like seeing your evolution of getting into the scripting world and, uh, we're going to get Scott there next. 

[00:36:07] Scott Rose: Am I the last one? Ben, Ben Green is on the Zoom. Yeah. We'll 

[00:36:12] Kamille Parks: never get him. 

[00:36:13] Scott Rose: We'll never get him. I'm close. We'll never get him.

[00:36:15] I'm on the fence. I might be coming over to scripting soon. 

[00:36:19] Jen Rudd: And so like after it's like, how do we do this without a third party tool? Like, is there any way that we can do this? That's the first question. That's like, if I have to go to make, because like we're clicking links and buttons and web and emails and stuff like that, fine, but like, I want to do everything outside of.

[00:36:36] Scott Rose: tools. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. It's funny. You bring up the third party tools. Ben green on table forms dot com posted a very complex Calendly solution, but it uses make though. Yeah. So you would, you would not approve, but it's a very complex Calendly solution that he came up with. 

[00:36:56] Dan Fellars: Very cool.

[00:36:57] A CASE FOR INTERFACE - AIRTABLE INTERFACES - [00:37:00] 00:37:00

[00:37:00] All right, let's move on. Next. We're going to learn about the new interface forms with Kamille. There you 

[00:37:08] Kamille Parks: go. Okay. So, um, right now I'm showing a simple, um, regular form view in air table. Um, I'm just going to highlight the features that are present. Um, if you're on. You know, at least the team's plan, um, and just point out that there is a button that says upgrade to new forms.

[00:37:32] I think the word upgrade has scared a couple people. Um, it's not upgrading your, like, billing level. It's basically saying, do you want to recreate this form in the new interface environment? So, you know, That's the only thing it's not. It's not going to charge you more to use that feature. If you see this in the top right, but form views, let you have a background [00:38:00] image and then an icon description and a title.

[00:38:04] Each of the fields can have helper text, which is separate from. the field descriptions. Um, you can hide fields from the form entirely. You can conditionally hide, uh, fields if, uh, conditions are met for any, uh, fields that appears above it in the form. Um, and you can make certain fields required for things like, um, select choices.

[00:38:32] You can do them as dropdowns or lists. You can limit specific. Options, and, um, it's the same with linked records as well. You can say only show from a particular view. And then lastly, at the bottom, if you turn this option on, see who submitted a response to the form, um, it's not new. I wish they would get rid of this.

[00:38:54] It's been there for forever. Um, it basically means you have to log in to air table in order [00:39:00] to submit the form, and it will fill in a created by field, um, with whomever Thank you. Filled in the form. So rather than created by saying anonymous, it would say Kamille parks. Um, and then, um, this is an option.

[00:39:18] If you want to send a copy of everyone's responses back to them after the form is submitted. If you're on teams and above, you can remove the air table logo and you can redirect somebody to a URL after the record has been submitted. And you can prefill whatever URL you provide with the record ID. So in this case, I'm using an interface that will jump to that record that we just submitted.

[00:39:45] Um, all of that is sort of old. Um, here's what it would look like in the actual form itself. But let's talk about interface forms. One, um, I'm seeing this [00:40:00] extra stuff at the top, you know, if I flip back and forth, um, you'll notice some slight difference visually one. The icon is way smaller. This is the same image.

[00:40:10] Um, I don't know. I just thought that was funny. But I'm seeing these extra things on top because I am logged in. Um, if I was not logged in and if I didn't have this option enabled, that was requiring me to log in. Um, none of this stuff up here would be. Okay. Uh, present. So just as a reminder, um, but it does follow regular interface detail page, um, options visually.

[00:40:38] And by that, I mean, if you, uh, watched our episode, a couple of. Weeks ago, when we went over some of the updates to the detail pages in Airtable interfaces, there are some things that they added, like, um, groups, as well as having a light gray background for certain groups, and then being able to [00:41:00] mix and match the width of, um, a field within a group row.

[00:41:05] And into the specifics of what you can control, um. For the function of the form, a lot of it is similar, but there is one key difference. This is the thing I was mentioning earlier in the episode, by the way, being able to click directly on the page somewhere and saying, I want to add a new field and it's this one, or I want to add a completely new field.

[00:41:28] I would click that, um, but in addition to just sort of rearranging things on the page, um, like I would in a detailed pages, something I'll point out for conditional visibility. Um, you can still do that in interface forms. However, it works slightly differently because things aren't always vertical. Um, in this case, I've selected developer, um, air table considers developer name, development name, address and architect as [00:42:00] fields that come before developer.

[00:42:02] So, if I were to say, choose, um, some filters for visibility, those are the only 3 options I can select. So. Um, just so everyone's aware what counts as something you could use that can as a condition for the other fields on the form. It must be either above it or to the left of it. So reading left to right.

[00:42:27] Um, other than that, it works how you would expect it to something that is nice. Um, about interface forms versus the old form views. Um, while you could pre fill a, um, air table form view, and you can also pre fill an interface form. Um, you can set default values for interface forms. Um, and. Um, I think that's just really nice for a lot of different, [00:43:00] um, fields.

[00:43:01] For instance, for selects, I can say by default, select these 2 options and don't allow them to, um, edit it. So. A use case that comes up a lot is you're submitting a form, and once it's submitted, it might have a status field, and that status might go under review, reviewed, approved, or something like that, where you want it to always come in after submission as well.

[00:43:30] Okay. Under review, um, or submitted or something like that. But you don't want the end user to be able to change that. You would probably put that in the URL as like a hidden field parameter, or you would not have it on the form at all and have an automation do the cleanup afterward. This kind of allows you to show it to your users.

[00:43:52] Um, While still not letting them change the value. So, um, I kind of like that as an [00:44:00] option to have. Um, and previously on interface type forms, um, you couldn't do this with, uh, select options. You couldn't have them in the, um, uh, radio or checkbox, um, orientation, but they have added that with the. Um, recent update, um, all fields can have helper text, including, um, much like with detail pages, the whole group itself can have its own descriptions.

[00:44:29] You can add much more context to your forms, and these are rich text, so you can have links and bullet points and things like that. You cannot add buttons, um, to, uh, groups like you can in detail pages, um, that kind of makes sense to me, um, but, you know, I could see maybe wanting to have a button that opens a link, for instance, um, you can't do that on an interface form.

[00:44:54] Uh, the most, you know, critical missing [00:45:00] feature that I've found when you're comparing form views to interface forms is the submission options. So, right now, um, I can really only say, Um, you know, either show them like nothing, just the thank you message or, like, have the form reset itself, um, or let the user reset the form so they could submit another one.

[00:45:26] You don't have the option to redirect the user to an interface after it's been created. Or to any URL after the form has been submitted. I think that's pretty critical, um, especially since this is in the interface environment, right? If I expand this out, this is where I would go to add and edit the form.

[00:45:50] Um, one of the things I'm using forms in my day to day is just to redirect somebody to the appropriate interface when they're [00:46:00] done. And you can't do that with these forms. So really hope they add that. Other than that, it's a pretty one to one, uh, translation with, you know, exceptions for styling, for instance, it's wider than it was before, um, and you can have side by side fields, um, as well as like grouped sections of fields as well.

[00:46:24] Scott Rose: They're also missing the automatic email feature, so you have to rebuild that yourself in an automation. Yes, 

[00:46:30] Kamille Parks: so Scott, you're referring to at the bottom. Email me. Um, and this email is always going to be your email. Um. If you're logged into air table, and you're editing this form, this option is going to change for each person who looks at it.

[00:46:45] Um, and then secondarily, um, I think allow users to request a copy. I don't know if that's in there either. I 

[00:46:55] Dan Fellars: think they said those are. What do they call them? Fast follow features. [00:47:00] 

[00:47:00] Kamille Parks: That's that's good. Um, they are useful. Um, the prerequisite for that is here. See who submitted a response, meaning you have to be signed into air table.

[00:47:10] That is a requirement for being able to send the end user a copy of their responses. So, yeah, I, I, I wouldn't be surprised if they added it, uh, certainly by the end of the year, but I. Thank you. Don't know if I've seen mentioned. I might have missed it. The redirect after submission. That's that's at least important to one of my workflows.

[00:47:33] Scott Rose: What 

[00:47:35] Dan Fellars: about, um, can you pre fill via 

[00:47:38] Scott Rose: URL? 

[00:47:39] Kamille Parks: You can. Um, 

[00:47:42] Dan Fellars: so what about hiding via URL? 

[00:47:45] Kamille Parks: I haven't tested hiding. Um, I might be able to do that off screen, but you can definitely pre fill. Okay. Uh, interface forms. Uh, I had trouble pre filling [00:48:00] linked records for a while. Um, but it was, it felt localized because other people were able to do it.

[00:48:06] Um, so, you know, it might have just been maybe a bug on my end or I was doing it improperly. Um, but pre filling. Interface forms using record IDs for linked records or linked record names or for select options, comma separated values or comma separated IDs of the select choices should all work in addition to the You know, normal select, uh, text fields that should all work.

[00:48:36] I don't think you can pre fill an attachment field. 

[00:48:40] Scott Rose: Can you, you said that you could set in the right margin, you could set defaults for some of the fields. Does that work for all fields, including single line text fields as well? Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

[00:48:49] Kamille Parks: So this is a single line text field. So if I wanted to add like.

[00:48:56] Sample developer. You could do that. Um, [00:49:00] and something that's really useful and wasn't present. I don't think in I don't have a date field, but I'll create a date field using this pop up. So really quickly. I just wanted to show when you add a default for a date field, you can set it to the current day. So that's just Nice.

[00:49:22] So obviously you'll have a created by field that you can add really easily, but a lot of the times you want to be able to modify that field, especially if you're importing a bunch of old records, just being able to do this, um, and saying, no, you can't edit it. You know, it will come in with today's date and you don't have to have an automation come back and clean that up for you.

[00:49:47] Dan Fellars: What about and they don't have, I guess, if you wanted to insert just text, you could create a new section and use the title and helper. 

[00:49:57] Kamille Parks: Yes. So, for instance, [00:50:00] this is a separate group. This, um. Images one is kind of down by itself because I didn't want the background. If I added a description on top and, uh, gave it its own large heading and said, here's some info, um, something that annoys me and this is petty, but.

[00:50:20] If I add a group title, it's smaller than the maximum heading or descriptions. Um, I get it. I think this is too large for most heading titles, but it is, I do think it's, it's a little odd that that's possible. I get it. I get it. I get it. But it is, I thought that was funny, but yeah, you can, um, you don't have to have fields inside sections.

[00:50:45] So I could have this just floating here. Um, you know, without the title and just say, here's some, some text. So like before the submit button, you may, you may want something like this, like now you're ready to submit the form and here's some extra [00:51:00] info about what will happen when you submit the form.

[00:51:03] Because, um, this box is really small for like your thank you message. So maybe that goes on the form itself, although what. What might be nice to see in the future is, um, you know, already, you know, give me a place where I can redirect them to a different page, but maybe there's like a separate interface type page that you can design that has stuff like this about like, here's our process and thank you for submitting.

[00:51:33] And you should expect to hear us follow up with you in X amount of days and click this link for more info and that kind of stuff that you might not want. On the form might went on the next page. And before I forget, publishing, um, or rather sharing forms is a little bit different. Um, because [00:52:00] there's some slightly new options that are, um.

[00:52:02] I found a little bit confusing at first. So, um, anyone on the web is just like anyone who has the URL can fill out the form. Um, and if you have the option enabled, they have to log in in order to submit it. Otherwise, literally anyone can fill it out. Same with FormView. Anyone at your organization, it's an enterprise level feature.

[00:52:26] So you have a set number of users, um, or set users in your enterprise instance. Um, who may or may not all have the same, uh, email domain as you. That's pretty useful. If you're in a large organization, anyone at a particular domain, I think that's also present for, um, other types of view sharing and air table and only users with base access, why I find that confusing.

[00:52:55] is because for interfaces, you can have access to the interface [00:53:00] and not the base. But if you have access to the base, you have access to all interfaces. And this option here, I find confusing because if you only have interface access, does that mean you can't use the form? So I, I, I just feel like maybe, maybe this is good to be its own option, but maybe they need another one.

[00:53:23] That's like only users with interface access, because that is a, uh, that is likely a smaller subset. So I just wanted to highlight that, but you can wonder, 

[00:53:33] Scott Rose: I wonder if they meant. Only users with base or interface access. I wonder if that's what they meant there. I 

[00:53:39] Kamille Parks: would, I would argue that this should say interface access, because if you have access to the base, you do have access to the interface.

[00:53:46] You must have access to the interface. Yeah, yeah. So I just, I find that confusing. Very, very confusing. And 

[00:53:55] Jen Rudd: there was a question about prefilling interface. 

[00:53:59] Kamille Parks: You can [00:54:00] prefill and it follows the same parameters. So, um, in the same syntax that you would use to prefill a regular form view, you would use that here.

[00:54:11] Of course, your prefix would be would be different. Um, but it's the same like question mark underscore, um,

[00:54:22] You know, 

[00:54:25] Dan Fellars: awesome. Very good stuff. Exciting more to come hopefully, but yeah, this, this is kind of the future of forms. If it works for you, I'd probably say, start using the new interface forms unless you need the features that aren't there yet. 

[00:54:45] SPOTLIGHT - BUILTONAIR COMMUNITY - 00:54:46

[00:54:46] Quick shout out, join our community at BuiltOnAir. com slash join, that will get you into our Slack group of thousands of Airtable fans and users that you can interact with on a daily basis, all things Airtable related.

[00:54:59] [00:55:00] So join us at BuiltOnAir. com. 

[00:55:02] FIELD FOCUS - 00:55:02

[00:55:03] And our final segment. Scott's going to walk through global fields. If you want to share your screen. And 

[00:55:11] Scott Rose: there we go. All right. So we're going to go back to basics. Uh, and we're going to talk about how, 

[00:55:18] Dan Fellars: Oh,

[00:55:23] Jen Rudd: we want some scripts. 

[00:55:25] Scott Rose: Exactly. We're not going to show scripts in the segment. The, uh, uh, we're going to talk about global fields. What are global fields? If you come from other databases, Languages, a global field is a value that you can access from anywhere else in your entire system. Uh, it's not necessarily attached to a particular record.

[00:55:49] So what are some good examples of global fields? Um, something like a company logo. If you're printing out a document, no matter what part of your system you're printing out a document from, [00:56:00] you may always want your company logo always to be at the top of the document or another thing like your company return address that may need to be on every single thing that you do in your system.

[00:56:12] Um, You know, terms and conditions. If you have a customer that is signing up the terms and conditions that they have to agree to is probably the same for every single customer. So those are those are three examples of things that no matter where you are in your system, no matter what tab you're on, no matter what you're using.

[00:56:33] Those things are consistent, and that's what they mean by the term global fields or global variables. They also use. And so this question actually came up in the air table community where somebody was trying to create terms and conditions for their customers. They were trying to send out automated emails from air table.

[00:56:53] And they always wanted that email to go out with their standard terms and conditions, [00:57:00] but the problem was they were getting sick of creating an attachment field and pasting in the terms and conditions every single time. For those emails that were going out. And so there's actually a couple of different ways to solve it, depending on whether you're using attachment fields or not, but the typical way to set up global fields in, in air table is creating a whole separate.

[00:57:26] Tab in your system. And I usually call it the admin tab. And what you can do is for each record in your admin tab, you can create a record for the one thing that you are considering to be global for your entire base. So here I have the name of this record is company address. So here's the company address that we could use as a global field.

[00:57:49] This one is the company logo. So here's our company logo. If we want this to be attached at the. You know, at the top of any documents or whatever. And then here are those terms and [00:58:00] conditions. Here's a PDF file of a contract, uh, that we would attach to our automations. So the way that you would access these though, is maybe a little bit unintuitive, uh, if you're using attachment fields, because what you might think is here's an automation.

[00:58:20] And that I've created here and we have a brand new customer that's created and we know that we want to send an email to the new customer and we know that as an attachment to that customer, we know that we actually want to attach these terms and conditions right here. So what you would think is, okay, well, that would be easy enough for me to do, right?

[00:58:45] Because what I can do is I can. Uh, when the rest, when the, when the customer is created, I can find records in that admin table and I could search for the record where the name contains [00:59:00] terms and conditions and so, and then, so then if I find that record, you know, as part of this automation, then what I can do is I can insert what it found.

[00:59:14] Into the email, but the thing is air table will not let you do that air table will not let you attach the result of a find record step as an attachment. You could see that these are all dimmed. So this is the result of me testing that original, uh, that, that other step there. So you can notice that all your different options here are dimmed.

[00:59:36] So you don't have the ability, the ability to search for an attachment in another table. And then insert it in to anywhere in your automation. Now, it actually does work if you're searching for something like text. So, you know, if you're just looking for the company address, it'll let you insert it as a list or as a grid, you know, it'd be a [01:00:00] list of one or a grid of one, because that's the result of the fine records.

[01:00:04] So you could sort of do it with text, but you definitely can't do it with attachments. So how would you do this? And Jen, you're going to appreciate this because we're not using a third party app to do this. We're doing this all with an air table. So basically, it's a very simple trick. Basically, what you have to do is leverage lookup fields.

[01:00:26] So what you would want to do is you'd want to create a brand new link record field here, and you would link to that admin table. And, uh, I'm just gonna allow linking to one record at a time here. And what you would do is you would actually link every single one of your records to the exact same record from your admin table.

[01:00:57] So that's sort of the downside, right? The downside [01:01:00] is that every single record needs to be linked to the appropriate record in your admin table. But that's very easy to manage because. You can set up an automation to whenever a new record is created in your system that it automatically sets this is the default or if you're using a form for your new record creations, you saw it today from Kamille's presentation that you can set defaults.

[01:01:25] Uh, you could do it through a URL link. Um, I'm assuming that linked record fields we could set as well. Yes. Nice. And then, very, very simply, all you have to do is add a lookup field for the attachment. And now, so as long as this field right here is automated, you can just hide this field altogether. And now, every single record in your system has our terms and conditions.

[01:01:53] As part of their record. And now when you go back into your automations and you go to send the [01:02:00] email, you can, and I might have to refresh this. You can bring in the attachment right there. And so that's how you would do it. And you could use that in a variety of different ways. But the trick is really just a linked record field and then leveraging lookup fields.

[01:02:24] And that's it. 

[01:02:26] Dan Fellars: So do you have an automation to auto link? 

[01:02:30] Scott Rose: Oh, I actually did not set up an automation to auto link for this particular demo. But what I would do is, you know, set up an automation, you know, new customer created. And then you can actually say, uh, you know, when a form is submitted or when a record is created.

[01:02:49] In that particular customers, you know in the customers table Then your next step right here would be update record. And so you would choose the record that [01:03:00] was just created and then What you oops, I didn't choose the table So you choose the table the record that was just created and then you would Go in here to the admin linked record field and This is where you would choose.

[01:03:21] Oh, you know, you would actually choose anything. You would actually type it in here. What did I call that terms and conditions with an ampersand? Yep. So what I would do is I would come in here and I would type in terms and conditions like that. And I'll just generate a preview here. And so then I'm going to turn on this automation and now it's turned on.

[01:03:45] And so now I'll go back to the customers table here. And I'll unhide that field. And now I'm just going to create a new record right here. And we have a new customer. And in a few moments, you will see that [01:04:00] it will auto fill here. With linking to the terms and conditions. There it is. Yeah. Here's our attachment.

[01:04:07] And what you'll probably want to do is you probably wanna create different linked record fields for each, uh, thing that you want. So I wouldn't actually call this admin, I would actually call this, you know, terms and conditions link, because I want just this one thing to be over here as the, uh. You know, as the, as the attachment, 

[01:04:31] Kamille Parks: you don't want it to accidentally send the company logo, for instance, because the automation won't be able to tell which look up right to to put in that.

[01:04:43] Exactly exactly. 

[01:04:44] Jen Rudd: Could you put everything in 1 entry in 1 record and admin and look up with the terms and conditions field 

[01:04:52] Kamille Parks: for the. Yeah. Yeah. I remember in the old days, you know, back in my day, you [01:05:00] would have your, your admin table would have one record in it. The name would be a single period or an asterisk.

[01:05:07] And you would just have a bunch of fields that would be like, as Jen said, instead of saying text, the, the name of the field would be company address. And then you'd have. Separate attachment fields for each type of attachment. That's another way to do it. Correct. And my suggestion, just in the customers table for those linked records, what I might do is I might turn off, um, in your.

[01:05:32] Oh, field permissions. I might say no one can edit except for automations, so you don't accidentally unlink it once it's there. 

[01:05:40] Scott Rose: Great, great, great. Yep. That is, yeah, just nobody can edit this, except this field can be modified by automations. Yeah. Great idea. Great idea. And yes, that's also the other, another great idea too.

[01:05:55] You could just have one record here and every one of these different things can [01:06:00] be. In a different field. So this would be the, so you could call this the company logo field. And then you would look at that up and then you would, you could have another attachment field here, just like you guys were saying that this would be the terms and conditions field.

[01:06:15] So multiple different ways of, of handling this basically. Yeah. Yeah. Great input. 

[01:06:25] Dan Fellars: The crazy thing is why you can't use, uh, the results from, uh, from a lookup from a search. 

[01:06:31] Kamille Parks: Yeah, I did not know that was a limitation. I didn't know that 

[01:06:35] Scott Rose: either. I know. Isn't that weird? 

[01:06:37] Kamille Parks: It is weird. I think it's 

[01:06:38] Jen Rudd: because array versus even if it's just one record.

[01:06:41] So it just treats arrays differently, 

[01:06:43] Dan Fellars: which Array, it'd be an array of an array. Yeah. 

[01:06:47] Kamille Parks: But air table, figure it out. People 

[01:06:52] Jen Rudd: try to get the ID, like the image URL, even though it's like. It's weird. Like they stopped letting you get the image [01:07:00] URL. So you can't just put image source. You have to put your attachment, 

[01:07:03] Kamille Parks: which is also annoying.

[01:07:05] And I know we're at the end really quickly, just because I was reminded in automations, the trigger when a form is submitted, that includes the new interface forms. So you can use that or form views that's already been brought into parity. 

[01:07:24] Dan Fellars: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you all for joining us. We will be back next week and see you then.

[01:07:30] Take care. Thanks. Thank you.

[01:07:47] OUTRO - 01:07:47

[01:07:48] Thank you for joining today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to check out our sponsor, OntoAir Backups. Automated backups for Airtable. We'll see you next time on the Built On Air podcast.[01:08:00]