1/14/2025 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S21-E02

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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.

Alli Alosa – Hi there! I’m Alli 🙂 I’m a fine artist turned “techie” with a passion for organization and automation. I’m also proud to be a Community Leader in the Airtable forum, and a co-host of the BuiltOnAir podcast. My favorite part about being an Airtable consultant and developer is that I get to talk with people from all sorts of industries, and each project is an opportunity to learn how a business works.

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.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:01:40 –

Following Articles Used in this Segment:

[TableForums] List your top Airtable feature requests here! – General Discussion / News & Announcements – TableForums: The Airtable Discussion Community

Meet the Creators – 00:01:41 –

Meet Kevin Rabesaotra from TypeFlow.

used to work in early-stage startups in Europe and the United States. As a Growth Engineer, I ran multiple experiments on the Product and Marketing side to impact revenue. But I also automated a lot of annoying stuff!

Visit them online

An App a Day – 00:01:42 –

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the TypeFlow App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “I built Typeflow, a PDF generator based on Airtable data. I created it because I was working for one of my customers, and I needed to generate PDFs based on Airtable data.”.

View App

Field Focus – 00:01:42 –

A deep dive into the Rollup Sorting For Ranking Rollup – Alli will take the new sorting functionality from Rollup fields to showcase how to automatic ranking that previous required automations to implement. 

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.

Following Articles Used in this Segment:

[TableForums] List your top Airtable feature requests here! – General Discussion / News & Announcements – TableForums: The Airtable Discussion Community

Segment: Meet the Creators

Start Time: 00:01:41

Kevin Rabesaotra –

Meet Kevin Rabesaotra from TypeFlow.

used to work in early-stage startups in Europe and the United States. As a Growth Engineer, I ran multiple experiments on the Product and Marketing side to impact revenue. But I also automated a lot of annoying stuff!

Visit them online

Segment: An App a Day

Start Time: 00:01:42

Airtable App Showcase – TypeFlow – I built Typeflow, a PDF generator based on Airtable data. I created it because I was working for one of my customers, and I needed to generate PDFs based on Airtable data.

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the TypeFlow App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “I built Typeflow, a PDF generator based on Airtable data. I created it because I was working for one of my customers, and I needed to generate PDFs based on Airtable data.”.

View App

Segment: Field Focus

Start Time: 00:01:42

Learn about the Rollup Sorting For Ranking – Alli will take the new sorting functionality from Rollup fields to showcase how to automatic ranking that previous required automations to implement.

A deep dive into the Rollup Sorting For Ranking Rollup – Alli will take the new sorting functionality from Rollup fields to showcase how to automatic ranking that previous required automations to implement. 

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:00:00] Intro: 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 11am Eastern and join our active community at BuiltOnAir. com. Before we begin, a word from our sponsor, On2Air. com. backups onto where backups provides automated air table backups to your cloud storage for secure and reliable data protection, prevent data loss and set up a secure air table backup system with onto where backups at onto air dot com.

[00:00:50] As one customer, Sarah said, having automated air table 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, On2Wear backups might be the most critical piece of the puzzle to guard against unforeseeable disaster. It's easy to set up, and it just works.

[00:01:08] Join Sarah, David, and hundreds more Airtable users like you to protect your Airtable data with On2Wear backups. Sign up today with promo code built on air for a 10 percent discount. Check them out at onto air. com. And now let's check out today's episode and see what we built on air.

[00:01:37] Dan Fellars: Welcome back to episode two of season 21 of the built on air podcast. Good to be with everybody. We've got myself, Kat, Camille and Allie back and Kevin joining us. Welcome Kevin to the show. 

[00:01:52] Kevin: Good 

[00:01:53] Dan Fellars: to have you with us. We'll learn more about Kevin and his story a little bit later in the show. I'm first going to walk us [00:02:00] through what we're talking about today.

[00:02:01] We always start with our around the bases, keep you up to date on all the news and updates and everything going on in the air table world. Then we'll talk about our sponsor onto air, and then we'll learn about Kevin and his story and background and how he came into this world of air table. And then Kevin's going to showcase his app that he built and how it works called type flow.

[00:02:24] And then quick shout out to join our community. And then finally Ali is going to walk us. We're going to continue. Last week we talked about this new feature with roll up sorting. Also look up sorting and Ali's going to show us a cool use case on how to use that for ranking. Okay. With that around the bases.

[00:02:43] First we start with some. Somber news. Everybody is likely aware of major fires going on in Los Angeles. Is doing okay. She's out there supporting with the [00:03:00] shirts. 

[00:03:00] Kamille Parks: Yeah. It's a, it's pretty bad. California gets fires every now and again, but this is it's it's bad. 

[00:03:11] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. So a lot going on. It's cool to see when, when there's tragedy, tragedy and, and difficulties that people.

[00:03:19] Rally together and our community is no different. There's a couple of people I want to highlight doing some cool stuff to try to help out. So max put together a max friend of the show, put together essentially a mini Airbnb built on their table. It's pretty cool. I actually tested it out, works great. And it helps people post if they've got a room available and his focus is in the music industry, which is obviously huge out in LA.

[00:03:46] And so he's kind of targeting people within that industry to help each other out if they've got a spare room. For anybody that's been impacted from the fires. And so he's looking for people that just kind of beta [00:04:00] test it, make sure everything's working. Okay. So if you want to help them out, he's got the link there.

[00:04:05] You can check it out. Also, if you want to see a cool portal built on air table, that's a good, good use case right there that he whipped together in a day. So good stuff there, Max. Then also, Peter asked if anybody had kind of a, you know, resource thing that might be built on Airtable that could have all the available resources, and Drew.

[00:04:27] Said he helped a company out there put something together and what does this look like? And so yeah, it's got an embedded Airtable inter view that has some options for different resources that you need. So it's cool to see people stepping up and helping out the community there. Shout out to those and.

[00:04:56] Yeah, next one kind of big industry news. I don't know [00:05:00] if you saw the CES was last week, I think. And this will, this will impact everything, including Airtable. So this is the NVIDIA CEO showcasing their new super chip computer that he's got in his hand there. That's like, I can't remember a thousand times.

[00:05:18] Faster, more powerful than, than current chips. It's pretty crazy. And so it'll be, you know, a desktop that can run your AI models. Now we just need Airtable to be able to support billions of, of records. So you can run AI models on it. I 

[00:05:38] Kamille Parks: feel like people are going to use this to. Mine crypto 

[00:05:44] Dan Fellars: possibly.

[00:05:44] Yeah. Yeah, among many other things. So yeah, it's a pretty big breakthrough and super computing to get it down to that level. So that's interesting to follow and see what the impact is. 

[00:05:59] Kamille Parks: Yeah, it looks [00:06:00] like it's the size of a Mac mini. 

[00:06:02] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Okay. Speaking of AI if you want to learn more about AI friend of the show, Jen Rudd is the group manager, group leader for AI.

[00:06:16] So in the air table community, they have a couple different groups, AI being one of them. Ben Green, which, which one does Ben lead 

[00:06:26] Alli Alosa: marketing? 

[00:06:27] Dan Fellars: Marketing. Okay. So there's a marketing and then I think there's one other group. And so they put on events, so check it out. Here's one coming up January 22nd.

[00:06:37] So if you want to learn more about AI, join that group on the air table community. And then Jen will walk you through how to use it and how it works within the Airtable environment. So it'd be a good one to check out. Speaking of Airtable community, they are approaching 2, 000 [00:07:00] certifications. They think by the end of this month they will hit that.

[00:07:03] I think they might hand out prizes to whoever is the 2, 000th. Certified. So if you are not certified yet, maybe time it, try to figure out where they're at. They don't disclose where they're at now. They just think they'll hit 2000. So I don't know when that's going to be, but that'd be cool to see if whoever is the winner of that prize.

[00:07:25] Kamille Parks: Is that across all of their certifications? I know there's a couple. 

[00:07:30] Dan Fellars: Yeah, I don't know. I, my guess is, yeah, it's a cross all. That'd be my guess. So I'm too late. I'm already certified, so I'm not a winner. Okay, next one. So we talked last week about some changes. Allie, we talked about this. You weren't there, but we talked about your findings.

[00:07:56] Somebody recognized as well that it increased from 30 to [00:08:00] 60. You want to give an update on there has been some. More information. 

[00:08:04] Alli Alosa: Yes. So at the same time as I found this out I won't get into the nitty gritty, but I had an automation just go absolutely outta control. It started sending text messages and emails to the same list of people over and over, and I was like, what is going on?

[00:08:22] And I looked at the history. There was only one failed run. Cause it's just a script that runs on a schedule every day. And long story short, it had failed because it timed out, but then I was looking at the history for each of these records that it was touching and it just kept running over and over and over again and updating the record, queuing it up to send over and over.

[00:08:44] So I contacted Airtable support and long story short, got to the, Conclusion that they had changed script timeout behavior so that if it times out, it retries itself which was a little scary because they didn't [00:09:00] announce it at all. But they are actually going to be rolling that back because they realized, wow, that actually affects a lot of things.

[00:09:07] So, we'll see what happens, but if you've noticed anything weird happening with your scripts, if they've timed out, but you're still seeing them update over and over again, that's probably why definitely a good idea to always just treat it as if it will rerun. Don't don't assume that it never will because.

[00:09:26] Scary things can happen. 

[00:09:29] Dan Fellars: Yeah. And their reasoning was because they do have retries on their other actions within automations, but not the scripting. And so they felt like that was bringing it on par with all the other actions. There's a big difference between a scripting action and a predefined, you know, update record action.

[00:09:49] So, yeah, 

[00:09:51] Kamille Parks: the retries for the other actions. They're not automatic. 

[00:09:55] Alli Alosa: They are apparently under the hood. I think they are with like if and I was wondering [00:10:00] about this. We haven't gotten any more information around like what they meant by that. But I was wondering if like, say you have a bunch of automations running at the same time.

[00:10:09] Like, do they. Maybe they have to wait because I don't know if they rate limit themselves or like, if, like, 1 update fail 1 update step fails, they retry it before saying, like, the whole automation has failed. So it doesn't show you that it retries, but I think under the it does, which again is good to know.

[00:10:32] Yeah, yeah, lots of new pieces of information coming to light here. I think yeah. 

[00:10:38] Dan Fellars: Did they say, are they rolling back the 60 back to 30 limit? They didn't clarify 

[00:10:45] Alli Alosa: that one. I'm happy about that one. I think it's great. 

[00:10:49] Dan Fellars: But my understanding of what I read was they were rolling back both. 

[00:10:54] Alli Alosa: Oh, that's not how I read it, but 

[00:10:57] Dan Fellars: it wasn't specific, but I assumed [00:11:00] that that was part of the change.

[00:11:01] And so a rollback would also put it back to 30 second timeout, but they didn't clarify. Maybe we could ask them. 

[00:11:09] Kamille Parks: Yeah, I like the 60 second timeout. I think that's nice there. I've been caught in a number of situations where I needed just 5 more seconds for this script to run. So, obviously, any limit at all.

[00:11:24] You're always going to be like, man, if I only had 5 more seconds, but 60 seconds, I think will cover the majority of what people are trying to do within a single script action in a native air table automation, the automatic retries. I don't, I don't like that the, the inability to turn that off is what I don't like.

[00:11:46] I, there are times where a script action is not really destructive. So, if it runs into an error, it's okay for it to retry itself. But that's not a universal truth, especially [00:12:00] since a lot of them are hitting other webhooks. They're, you know, sending invoices to clients sometimes, so, you know, it's possible to auto charge clients in Stripe.

[00:12:12] So you don't want that to run over and over and over again, unless you want to get sued. So I just feel like that should never have been released without warning, no announcement. Picks and chooses when they bring out the, 

[00:12:33] Dan Fellars: they thought it was a bug fix and not a new feature.

[00:12:40] Alli Alosa: Consequences. That's for sure. 

[00:12:44] Dan Fellars: Very good. Well, we'll see. We'll see if they keep the 60 or when they roll out. Let's see what they say on that. 

[00:12:51] Alli Alosa: Well, 

[00:12:52] Dan Fellars: this might be a good opportunity on the community. They are having an open feedback exchange, January 29th. [00:13:00] 8 30 a. m. Pacific. And so, yeah. So if you want to give any feedback to the community, I don't I think this is more community specific, not necessarily product.

[00:13:14] Oh, yeah. Sign up on this link. And let them know what you want of the air table community. Join that. 

[00:13:23] Kamille Parks: My feedback remains the same. This website sucks. It's really difficult to find to search for things. It's, it's difficult to put in long, complex answers. I used to. Like my niche on the community used to be formulas and scripts and formatting those is just a nightmare now.

[00:13:47] And so I stopped going, so I don't know my, my numbers have plummeted on the community because it's just that hard to use. 

[00:13:59] Dan Fellars: It's a, it's a [00:14:00] badge of honor. If you can say you live through the community migration of when was it? 23, I think. 22 

[00:14:10] Kamille Parks: or 23 back in my day. It was easier to comment. Yes, exactly. 

[00:14:20] Dan Fellars: Cool.

[00:14:21] All right. A couple new product feature, a couple new product releases that I found that we found on reddit that were kind of interesting. Here's one called ship table. So ship table dot pro. So custom portals. There are a couple of portals out there. Okay. but a new one and this one does not charge per user.

[00:14:41] So if you're looking to if you're looking to avoid having to pay per user for, for portal users, here's a new one that you could try out. I don't know if they've set their pricing yet, so still pretty early. But yeah, it could be interesting [00:15:00] currently free. Okay, here's one. I don't think this will come through.

[00:15:04] I don't think the audio will come through, but this was amazing. Let me go to the website. Okay, so voice prompt. I o voice dash prompt. I o. So it's a it's an extension that's driven by voice a I that can actually you can tell it. Where to go within your air air table environment. You can say, go to that tab and it'll automatically switch it.

[00:15:29] So it's all voice controlled. See, you probably can't hear the audio. You can see it.

[00:15:40] Wow.

[00:15:47] Alli Alosa: That's pretty cool. 

[00:15:50] Kamille Parks: The often underutilized set active table or set current table. What are those? 

[00:15:56] Dan Fellars: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to figure out. It looks like it's [00:16:00] an extension. It's gotta be a Chrome extension as well. 

[00:16:05] Kamille Parks: It could be You know, I don't know how they're implementing using a camera. I feel like not the camera, the microphone.

[00:16:13] I think that's probably easier to do in a Chrome extension than an air table extension, but air tables extension library does have hooks. And methods that allow you to read whatever the current tab table or view is and then switch to a different one. So what it's likely doing is reading all the metadata, listening for the word, and then trying to find the name of the table that most closely matches what it just heard.

[00:16:45] So yeah, I feel like that's nice if you're. If you have a lot of tables, sometimes they added that dialogue so that you can, like, scroll through all your tables. If you have, like, 20 or more, [00:17:00] but even I have trouble, like, finding things sometimes. So this feels like a, a neat little trick to get to things a little bit quicker.

[00:17:09] Dan Fellars: Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it uses AI. I was, I was experimenting with Google's AI and they, I saw they have, like, a new. screen recorder AI. So it'll actually process what's on your screen and layer AI on top of it. And so the demo that I saw wasn't with their table, but with another product. I think it would actually, it would be very similar to this.

[00:17:38] And, and you just basically share your screen recording with them and I, AI, and it will process the screen. It's pretty crazy. 

[00:17:49] Alli Alosa: It's nuts. I saw like a, I think it was a demo on LinkedIn by Anthropic and they were It was basically like a [00:18:00] whole OS built in with AI. And like they said, like, go, like, can you make me a website to like, with a landing page for this?

[00:18:09] And like the whole, like the AI literally like opens up all these things, signs up for like a website to host, creates its own server, puts the site online. Like, it's like absolutely insane. And the person's just sitting there watching as all of it is done in front of them. It's really crazy. 

[00:18:31] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Very cool.

[00:18:33] All right. Yeah. So we'll follow this. See, see where this goes. All right, let's move on. Next one. Hey, Mickey has a question. This is good reminder. I know we've talked about this in the past. Actually, I think Joseph mentions even came on our show and did a did a podcast segment on this. But the issue is, if you have a sink table, let me know.

[00:18:58] Especially if it's like [00:19:00] multi layer. If you're if you have like 1 to 1 to 1 you need to do something to wake up the bases for them to generate that sink. There needs to be something to update it. And so there's a couple examples of how you can, like, set up an automation to just, you know, Perform an update via the API and things like that.

[00:19:21] They do kind of fall asleep. The basis. 

[00:19:24] Alli Alosa: Yeah. 

[00:19:27] Dan Fellars: So that's an issue. You need to ping it every once in a while. Hey, we'll be talking a little bit more about this, but Carlson is kind of on the similar page to Allie playing around with this. And so this really, this feature we talked about it last week and again, this week, like it kind of is.

[00:19:47] Cool little game changer at the data layer dealing with sorting of, of look up and roll up fields. So if you want another light real world example, Carlson shares. [00:20:00] His formulas and how he does his ranking or sorted for the, yep, the in the past required an automation. 

[00:20:09] Alli Alosa: So there's 

[00:20:10] Dan Fellars: that.

[00:20:12] Alli Alosa: Yeah, I'm so excited about this. And 

[00:20:15] Kamille Parks: I, I miss w Van Hall . I know, 

[00:20:18] Alli Alosa: right? 

[00:20:19] Kamille Parks: You would've done with this community. My goodness. For the uninitiated, if you were there in like 2018? 2019. I think he was before my time 2017. Even on the Airtable Community Forums, there was one user, I believe W Van Hall and the formulas.

[00:20:42] That this person would create in order to do what seems like simple operations, if you're used to Excel or Google sheets to be like, give me the top five of these records, they were crazy very difficult for me to [00:21:00] understand but they stood the test of time for years until slowly, but surely air table added five features that culminated in the same result, which is now very easy to do.

[00:21:12] As Allie will demonstrate later in the show, but my goodness, back in my day, reinvent the wheel, 

[00:21:23] Dan Fellars: we're going to, we should. I've got a crazy idea of like a documentary to track him down and bring him back.

[00:21:33] Kamille Parks: The very last episode of this podcast has to be going through his like top five solutions and then trying to do it again in modern air table. 

[00:21:40] Dan Fellars: Yeah. That would, that would be fascinating. With 

[00:21:45] Alli Alosa: like a page designer, like where he like somehow turned it into like a heat map. Like it was absolutely insane.

[00:21:55] How? Like, yeah, exactly. 

[00:21:58] Kamille Parks: I remember the bar [00:22:00] charts inside of fields. 

[00:22:01] Alli Alosa: Oh, yeah. I've done that once. It was fun. Hilarious stuff. 

[00:22:09] Dan Fellars: I have reached out to him in the last year. He didn't respond to me, but try again. Okay. Well, that concludes our around the bases. You are now up to date on everything new in the air table world.

[00:22:22] So if you are running your business on on air table, it's best practice to make sure your data is stored outside of air table as a backup. That's where on square comes in. Make sure your data is backed up. We we support box Dropbox, Google Drive. And Microsoft OneNote, and we back up your, your data, your attachments, your meta information, and also have the ability to restore it back in to the best of air tables abilities.

[00:22:52] And so check it out onto air. com use promo code built on air to get you a discount. And start backing up your data and sleep [00:23:00] peacefully at night. Okay, with that, we're going to learn a little bit about Kevin. Okay, tell us your last name, Kevin. 

[00:23:08] Kevin: Hey yes, I'm Kevin. I'm French. I live in the south of France.

[00:23:12] And do you want me to introduce myself now or how do you want to Yes. Okay. So I'm a former growth engineer. I worked in different early stage startups in the United States, but also in Europe. My goal was to run experiments in the product, but also in the website for the marketing team to drive more revenue, to drive more leads.

[00:23:35] To drive more retention in the product and et cetera. But I also helped the teams to automate their processes via a no code tool like Airtable but also Zapier, Meg, and other tools. And for the last two years I've done some freelancing on diverse diverse topics. And among them was helping some company to implement to implement [00:24:00] Airtable and et cetera.

[00:24:01] And I, I had a mission where I needed to help a company to generate PDF based on Airtable data. And first I thought that it was going to be easy. And finally, it was a bit painful, even for me as a technical people, because solution out there, out there are a bit complex to use. And for, from my point of view, for non technical people, it can be it can be really painful to implement by themselves.

[00:24:34] The, the fact of automating the PDF generation. So from creating templates to mapping the data between the template and to build fields and importing the script, et cetera, everything was a bit complex. So that's why I decided to create a type flow. To make sure that anyone, even the non technical people can can implement by [00:25:00] themselves the possibility to automate the creation of a PDF based on airtable data.

[00:25:07] So that's the core of the product, Pipeflow so helping you to generate a PDF. I don't know if you have any kind of questions or if you want me to give more details about our main feature and et cetera, but feel free to ask. 

[00:25:23] Kamille Parks: Well, we'll do a deep dive in a moment, but I do. I always like hearing about how people find their way into the.

[00:25:32] Sort of air table ecosystem because you used said yourself. You're a technical guy. So used to You know, very detail oriented coding and building something from scratch And then there's the world of sass where you can still build a lot of things with it But a lot of things come pre packaged. How did you?

[00:25:59] Feel [00:26:00] about Airtable the first time you came across it, were you like, this is too restrictive? Or were you like, impressed with what you could do? 

[00:26:07] Kevin: You meant when I discovered the first time Airtable. That's it. Yes. Oh. Oh, it was a long time ago. Mm-hmm . So first I had the feeling that it was not really helpful.

[00:26:20] Mm-hmm . Because it looks like a lot Excel, but. I had a mentor that showed me how to use Airtable, and that's when I started to understand how how it works and the value of it, and et cetera. I think if you don't have any kind of use case and you discover Airtable, you can You can say to yourself, okay, this tool is not is not powerful.

[00:26:46] It just directs a beautiful Excel and that's it. Then when you start to discovering the formula, the links record and et cetera, et cetera, it's much more than just an exception. It's [00:27:00] a, it's a database for for people that are not technical. Even if if you want to implement complex stuff.

[00:27:10] Sometimes you need some technical skills. 

[00:27:13] Kamille Parks: I think that's absolutely true. There's a lot. I feel like even today with other products that are new to me, I'll see like a demo video and I'm like, cool. What do I, what do I do with it? Airtable is no different. If you don't have like a defined use case, you're probably going to be like, oh, I could make lists.

[00:27:34] Which is true, but you could do a bunch of other things. And so it's helpful to have something in your head already. 

[00:27:41] Kevin: And that's that's curious because a few days ago, a few months ago, I discovered Fillout, the builder for Airtable. And first I said to myself, but what is different from the the form from Airtable and other forms and et cetera?

[00:27:58] And I [00:28:00] studied, you know, to have specific use cases, and then I discovered the why fill out is really powerful. So I think the value of a product doesn't come necessarily when you discover it first, but only when you have a use case or something like that. 

[00:28:17] Kamille Parks: Yeah. And there's, we're probably going to see a similar thing with your product, Typlo, but fill out is so good because it fills in so many gaps that Airtable's native forms just don't do or can't do and there are times where as much as you could build within Airtable natively, sometimes, depending on your use case, you need another tool to help you out and PDFs have been Mm hmm.

[00:28:46] Often maligned in Airtable's native capabilities, and I remember when I was doing my very first set of extensions for Airtable, I was like, I'm gonna build a [00:29:00] PDF builder. I don't know why Airtable does not a mate this. And then I was like, Oh, Because it's hard, as I mentioned, thinking it was going to be easy at first, and I was like, yeah, so did I.

[00:29:12] I gave up.

[00:29:17] So when did you first get the idea for Typeflow? 

[00:29:22] Kevin: Yes so I think it was one year ago. So I had a customer that came to me, and they said to me, yeah, I need to generate PDF automatically, and et cetera, et cetera. And I said, yes. Thinking that it was going to be easy. So first, of course, I, I I tried by page designer, but it was really limited.

[00:29:44] And then I tried some third party tool like documents, for example. So, honestly, document is very powerful, but the learning curve is is too high. I mean, for more technical people, it's just crazy. [00:30:00] Even for me at the beginning, while I was like, it's not possible to, to, to build by yourself a template and to map the data and et cetera, if you're not used to those kinds of tools.

[00:30:13] And I started to give up with documents and I tried other social, but I didn't find out anything else. So I came back to document. And then I, I finally released the, I mean, finished the mission, but at the end of it, I was frustrated, like, is it possible to struggle as much as that just to create PDF and it stays in my head for a long time.

[00:30:43] And I decided to launch it three months ago because I ended the mission and I didn't find any other clients. So I decided to give it a go to see where it goes. 

[00:30:58] Kamille Parks: Awesome. So, [00:31:00] once again, having a clearly defined use case really helps. So, when you're building Typeflow, you built it all yourself? 

[00:31:10] Kevin: Yes, I built using software engineering languages.

[00:31:16] Kamille Parks: And for Airtable specifically, there's a couple of different routes a developer can take to have it access your data. You can have an extension that's sort of built into your base, or you could have it on your own separate website where you can log in separately. How did you arrive at which approach you wanted?

[00:31:36] Or, you know, you could always do a blend of the two. 

[00:31:39] Kevin: That's a good question. To be honest, since I use Airtable, I don't use a lot extension. And so naturally I went to the second path, so a SAS and not an extension. 

[00:31:55] Kamille Parks: That makes sense. I think as people are using interfaces more and [00:32:00] more, they're not necessarily looking at the data layer as much.

[00:32:03] Once again, Airtable, let us put extensions on the interfaces. 

[00:32:08] Alli Alosa: Yes, 

[00:32:09] Kamille Parks: they'll get to it eventually. Maybe. Do we want to take a look at a typelo? Yes. Awesome. 

[00:32:16] Dan Fellars: Yeah, if you wanna share your screen, Kevin, please. Let's do it. Walk us through type flow. And the website is type flow us. 

[00:32:26] Kevin: Exactly. So can you see my screen?

[00:32:29] Let go. Yes. So just to give you more context about type flow so we. It's possible to generate a PDF based on a Google Doc for templating. We choose Google Doc because we think that most of the people on the earth know how to use Google Docs. At least, I mean, I think most of us know it. It's also possible to generate PDF based on Google Slides.

[00:32:59] [00:33:00] If you want to create certificate, for example, I think it's better to use Google Slide than Google Docs. And we see some of our customers using it, even if Google Docs is the main use case. So let's choose that. Here you can you can use available templates if you don't have one or you can select directly from your Google Drive.

[00:33:26] So for this use case, we are going to use the invoice template. because it's a recurring use case.

[00:33:44] So no, that is a template has been duplicated. We can use it.

[00:33:56] There is an error. I'm so sorry. 

[00:33:59] Kamille Parks: Live [00:34:00] demos every time. 

[00:34:03] Kevin: So it worked well. Let's try this one.

[00:34:10] Oh, I'm so sorry. Let

[00:34:17] me try this.

[00:34:21] Okay. . 

[00:34:22] Kamille Parks: It could be one of, is Airtable down? 

[00:34:26] Kevin: sometimes No.

[00:34:27] I'm so sorry. I don't know what's happening.

[00:34:30] Can I share again in a few minutes? I need to check what's happening in the backend. Sorry. 

[00:34:37] Dan Fellars: Why don't we, we can move to Allie's segment and then we'll come back. 

[00:34:41] Alli Alosa: Yeah. 

[00:34:43] Dan Fellars: Okay. 

[00:34:44] Alli Alosa: Awesome. 

[00:34:45] Dan Fellars: Allie, let's warn about roll up sorting. 

[00:34:49] Alli Alosa: All right.

[00:34:56] Okay. All right. So this is. [00:35:00] Something that I like shot up in the middle of the night and was like, Oh my gosh, I could do this now with just a formula and don't have to worry about automations and sorting records and all this fun stuff. And I want to present a caveat, which is that there's like a lot, a million ways to expand on this.

[00:35:20] And also it can't do everything. So it's not like a hundred percent perfect, but it's a step forward. So essentially what I want to be able to do is. Automatically rank records based on any criteria. For example, say, I have a value here and I want to get a number. Ranking for what, what person is number one amongst all of these values in the database and then so on and so forth.

[00:35:52] I want to be able to order these and have it change if these numbers change. So, if I grab Clovis [00:36:00] here and change their value to 900. Oh, no. Why? What is he? 

[00:36:05] Kamille Parks: You're not alone. Kevin will just air out for no reason. Okay, so maybe 

[00:36:14] Alli Alosa: this happened to me earlier today, too. Let me, let me try logging in one more time.

[00:36:21] Kamille Parks: I 

[00:36:24] Alli Alosa: don't know what's going on. I gotta do some 2FA really quickly. And yeah, I don't know. This is the second time today that it's done that to me too. Fun. All right. I'm better. I'm back now. Let's see. Okay. All right. Are we good? Okay. So if I change someone's value to something else, like 900, this should once it's done saving dot, dot, dot, there we go. That's now my number one record. I could, you know, [00:37:00] change all these values and it should fall into the right order.

[00:37:04] I'm going to go over very quickly how this works. The first thing that I need to do is I need to link all the records that I want to be part of the ranking to a record on another table. So I just have all of these linked to this one record. And then I've rolled up their record IDs. And I'm sorting them by the value field.

[00:37:30] So whatever my ranking criteria is, I want to put that into my sorts. And if I had, you know, a tiebreaker field, I could include this. So sort first by the value and then by something else or alphabetically, however you want to do it. Then I just use array unique values. To get to for my aggregate aggregation formula, you could really use anything.

[00:37:56] You just want to make sure that there is a separator. And that. [00:38:00] That's, that's really it, I guess. You just need to use a separator. So I've improved on this since the first time I showed it, Dan, to a couple other people, where here is essentially how it works. I have it all working with just one function, which is really big and scary, and I'm just going to show how it breaks down.

[00:38:24] So all of this is all combined based on the steps in these fields, but I could just delete these. And keep just this. I just wanted to show how it works. So that is essentially step one is I'm just joining all of the values into one big roll up. So I roll them up to the linked record and then back down to here.

[00:38:48] And then I want to find where the record ID of this record is. In this list and take everything [00:39:00] that comes before it. Yeah, so I'm cutting, I'm cutting it at where I find the record ID and just take all the stuff that comes prior to that. And then this is a W van hall formula that he shared on the community forum years ago, and he actually said himself, he stole it from somebody else, if I recall correctly, and, didn't understand how it worked, and neither do I.

[00:39:28] I do not get it, but what it does is Counts how many commas there are inside of this field rank step two. 

[00:39:36] Kamille Parks: Oh, I get it. Yeah, 

[00:39:39] Alli Alosa: I don't get it 

[00:39:40] Kamille Parks: because the reason why you're using record IDs and I'm sure you're going to get there's because there are constant value and they always have a value. Yes, I believe it's 17 characters long.

[00:39:50] And what this thing is doing is saying, well, we know that the length of this is going to be some multiple of [00:40:00] 17, except for the commas. So if you take the commas out, you'll eventually be able to divide that number by 17 to get, like, the number of record IDs are in there and then seeing the commas in there.

[00:40:15] Does something so somewhere along the line. I think you can count the commas to get to that number faster. 

[00:40:22] Alli Alosa: Right? 

[00:40:23] Kamille Parks: That might be what's happening. 

[00:40:24] Alli Alosa: That's what I'm doing here. So originally, my first attempt at this was I actually did just have. the record IDs, and I was dividing by 17, but I didn't want to continue doing that just in case the record ID length ever changes in the future.

[00:40:43] I wanted something that was like a little more future proof and I decided to just go with, all right, if I just count how many separators, i. e. commas, appear prior to the record ID That is in this record and then add one that'll [00:41:00] give me the rank. So now these don't even have to be the same length anymore.

[00:41:04] They could literally just be any unique identifier as long as they're unique. And then so, yeah, that's that's what this is doing is it's counting. This counts how many commas appear in this field. So we've got one, one, there's one, two, two, one, two. And there's a third one. It just counts how many commas there are prior to the record ID for this record.

[00:41:28] And then it adds one. So this is like the final one is just, I 

[00:41:34] Kamille Parks: love how simple the last one. 

[00:41:35] Alli Alosa: I know I just wanted to like break it out and do all of its constituent parts. But basically this function takes all four of these formulas and. Puts it all into one single thing and then outputs the number, which is this pretty rank.

[00:41:50] Yeah, that it is complex, but also really fun [00:42:00] because now this will just work and I don't ever have to worry about it. Used to have automations that would like, you know, Either sort and do all this stuff and then update or field with the rank that they were at at that day and it just always all ultimately got out of sync with itself.

[00:42:17] Yeah, so this is going to be now 

[00:42:20] Dan Fellars: explain so you could easily set up a sort on this view to sort by the value to get the word source. So what's the benefit of. Having an extra field that displays the rank. 

[00:42:34] Alli Alosa: So if you wanted to, for example, like have a leader board for your organization or your company or whatever, you could now filter a view to be like, always only show the top five people.

[00:42:48] You could, you know, use that, that ranking to, like, start bucketing your data more. There's all sorts of things you could do from there. But I think for me, [00:43:00] the people I know ask a lot about, like, How can I make a leaderboard? And how can I, you know, find the top X records? And this is a great way to do it.

[00:43:11] Kamille Parks: Yeah, and technically, not even technically, you could do this with text based values where, which are a little bit more difficult to sort if you don't want to do it alphabetically. So, being able to have the rolled up value be different from the value by which you're sorting is very useful in that regard.

[00:43:36] And I, I think Kavon, friend of the show, mentioned that if there are ties in the value, it might not, it's, I think this implementation isn't necessarily going to account for a tie. However, I think you can modify slightly if, because you're no longer expecting. Record IDs, necessarily, [00:44:00] if you pad your number with so that they're always the same length, you'd be able to, I think, find where that value is that the first appearance of that value in the list of all the values.

[00:44:14] So ties would end up with the same number. 

[00:44:17] Alli Alosa: Yeah, I'm, I Also was playing around with how to do that right before this call and I deleted all the fields because I didn't finish it. But yes, I, if you notice these 2 numbers are the same and it ignores it. It's just like 7 and 8 and some type. Some people are okay with ranking like that.

[00:44:34] Some people want to actually show, you know, they would want both these to be 7 and then this still to be 9. And what Camille just described is a very elegant and simple solution to doing that. 

[00:44:46] Kamille Parks: In theory, I haven't done it. So I'm, what I just said, I think works, but I have no proof. 

[00:44:52] Alli Alosa: I think it would too. I just, I literally was like going through all these hoops trying to be like, what's the best way to do this?

[00:44:58] And you just said that. And I [00:45:00] was like, I think that's the best way to do 

[00:45:02] Kamille Parks: it. I think if you pad the number, so you'll need an additional formula maybe to You know, add a bunch of zeros, depending on the how many digits are in your number. But I think you can get it to work. 

[00:45:14] Alli Alosa: Yeah, what I usually do is I'll put like an asterix on both sides and have that be the formula.

[00:45:21] And then I'll search for asterix value. Asterix. So that would only. It doesn't get confused with that number of another number. 

[00:45:30] Kamille Parks: Yeah, so you can find exactly 906 rather than 1906. Exactly. 

[00:45:38] Dan Fellars: Yeah, very cool. This is good. Definitely a cool trick to add to your repertoire. All right, Kevin, how we doing? 

[00:45:47] Kevin: I'm doing good.

[00:45:48] Thanks. So figure it out. 

[00:45:52] Dan Fellars: Here, hold on. Just give me one second, shout out before we get to Kevin. Just if you want to join our community [00:46:00] built on air. com slash join. We'll get you in, join our Slack community of. Thousands of Airtable users also sign up for our newsletter. And if you're on LinkedIn, quick plug, if you're on LinkedIn, join our newsletter on LinkedIn, you can get those over LinkedIn as well.

[00:46:16] So great information. Hannah on our team does a great job compiling all the latest news and everything on our newsletter. So check it out there. And okay, let's go back to Kevin. 

[00:46:28] Kevin: Thank you. 

[00:46:30] Dan Fellars: You want to share your screen? Yes.

[00:46:41] Kevin: Can you see my screen? Yes. Okay, cool. So let's go back to where we were. So you can choose between Google Doc or Google Slide. Then in my example, I wanted to import the invoice template.[00:47:00] 

[00:47:02] Okay. Perfect. I need to select it.

[00:47:12] Okay. So you have two way to generate PDF with Typeflow. You can generate Airtable through a button, for example, or automation. Or you can create your own form with Typeflow by drag and drop, by dragging and dropping the Airtable field in the, to build your form, sorry. And then whenever there is a submission, again.

[00:47:39] It will automatically generate a PDF without going through air table automation. But for this demo, we are going to go to the second pass, so generate PDF directly in air table. So let's choose a base choose a table, an attachment field. [00:48:00] So whenever we generate a PDF, it will be attached, attached to the attachment field.

[00:48:07] And then you have different configuration if you want to overwrite a PDF or not, save it in Google Drive, save it as a Google Doc, and et cetera. And then it's easy to map the data between between the Google variable and the heritable field. So let me show you quickly. The Google templates. As you can see, there are the different the different variable already there.

[00:48:33] So company name, company address, company city, etc. And it's also possible to, to get access to line items in tables to to return all the data from another table. So that's the template. And then we can do a mapping, for example, so it's just for the demo, the states, [00:49:00] team, and et cetera, and et cetera.

[00:49:09] And then for reference table, you can select another table, you can do some grouping. So I need first to select some some data. And there you can select a grouping field. And now you can personalize the file name, sorry, based on a different different variable from Airtable. And you just need to click on generate and it must generate the PDF automatically.

[00:49:45] If there is no error.

[00:49:54] Kamille Parks: So in this case, did we select a particular record or is it picking the first record? [00:50:00] 

[00:50:00] Kevin: Good question. It selects the first record and indeed we don't select a particular record. So this is just a test. So yeah, it was a test. So as you can see, so I didn't feel all the variable, but it replaces the variable that we selected based on what we what we input here.

[00:50:20] So that's it for the demo. And then you can, finally, you can import this link to your air table. So let me show you. So for example, here, it's already in place, but you can create a new button.

[00:50:47] So we say button.[00:51:00] 

[00:51:02] And whenever you need to generate a PDF for a record, you just need to click on the button here. So that's it for the demo. I don't know if you have any kind of questions, but feel free to ask. 

[00:51:17] Kamille Parks: I think we had someone in our chat who had mentioned some headaches they had found with other solutions with page breaks.

[00:51:28] Because you're using Google Docs, I believe you can have page breaks entered automatically or just by default in your template, right? What is page breaks? So no matter how much content is on page one, you can force all additional content to go to the next page. 

[00:51:49] Kevin: Okay? So to be honest, I don't know.

[00:51:52] I don't know. I 

[00:51:54] Kamille Parks: think 

[00:51:56] Dan Fellars: thinking Google it will automatically. [00:52:00] Page break with the text. 

[00:52:03] Kamille Parks: Yes. So that is different from page designer in that page designer, if you can have, if the end result. You want is some are going to be one page and some are going to be five pages and a variable length. You have to make the template five pages long and then just not print the last four pages is effectively what you have to do with page designer, which is terrible.

[00:52:36] Kevin: Yes, indeed. Yes. No, that is the case. With type four. I mean, from the from my users, the page, the page size are just automatically based on what they what there is inside the page. 

[00:52:53] Dan Fellars: Kevin, we did get a question from from our viewers asking if there's a way to work with [00:53:00] multiple records at the root level.

[00:53:03] Like all multiple records that could go into a template instead of a one to one between a template and a single record. 

[00:53:12] Kevin: So I'm not sure I understood the question. 

[00:53:16] Dan Fellars: So let's say you have, like, you want to, you want to create, like, a brochure of houses, like a real estate brochure, and you want to be able to, like, pick from your list of houses and say, I want to create a brochure of these five houses, and you could just pick five and send it in, and it would create, like, one page for each record that you send.

[00:53:39] Okay. 

[00:53:39] Kevin: I know today that's not possible. Unfortunately, you need to do it one by one. One record, one brochure, another one, etc. 

[00:53:48] Kamille Parks: But with native Airtable automations, presumably you could have the automation just loop through the five. So if you create a view or something, you can have an [00:54:00] automation run and say for each record in this view, hit this URL and it would Generate for each of those 5.

[00:54:07] So that would be 5 separate PDFs still. So I don't know if that's to that 1 commenter's liking, but you would at least be able to get 5 PDFs with 1 template. They just won't all be together 

[00:54:22] Dan Fellars: and I've seen. And there are APIs and I've seen other products similar to yours that actually allow for, they, they essentially have a merge API endpoint where you could send it.

[00:54:34] So you could create the five and then send it and say, do it that way. 

[00:54:40] Kevin: Today we don't support that yet.

[00:54:47] Dan Fellars: That's cool. Cool. Yeah. Advantage, I 

[00:54:49] Kamille Parks: think of using Google docs and, you know, Google slides as well as you could have headers and footers. So no matter how many pages you have, [00:55:00] if you have a a template tag in your header or footer, that could be dynamic as well. So I think that's a pretty nice implementation.

[00:55:10] Kevin: Exactly. And I don't know if I can talk a bit about the pricing. So currently we are still an early company, so we offer a lifetime plan. At 200, so you pay once and that's it and you can generate as many PDF as you want. I think it will end at the end of the month and then we will switch to a monthly plan like our competitors.

[00:55:38] So if anyone wants to know more about Typeflow, feel free to reach out to me. 

[00:55:43] Dan Fellars: Yeah, that's a great offer. Very cool. How's the response been with the customers you're working with?

[00:55:55] How people responded your early? 

[00:55:58] Kevin: Honestly, I launched [00:56:00] the tool end of october and I had my first paid customers a week after, and they were really happy about the product, even if there were a lot of bug at this time, to be honest. But they were really happy because they didn't have you know, to, to think about the number of PDF they needed to generate per month, because there was, there were, there is no limit, sorry.

[00:56:28] And globally it does the job. So most of my customers right now are really happy about what I what I offer. 

[00:56:37] Dan Fellars: Very cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. I'm a fan of using Google Docs versus like some other competitors because you have something that you can use and repurpose and you're familiar with it already as a, as a layout system.

[00:56:53] So I do like that approach and hopefully everything works out for you, Kevin. 

[00:56:59] Kevin: Yes, I hope to. 

[00:56:59] Dan Fellars: [00:57:00] Awesome. Cool. Well, that concludes this week's show. Glad you all could join us and we will be back next week for episode three. Take care everybody. Thank you. Bye.

[00:57:25] Intro: Thank you for joining today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to check out our sponsor onto our backups, automated backups for air table. We'll see you next time on the built on air podcast.