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welcome back we are alive we are still
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here six months later the BuiltOnAir
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podcast is back good to be with you
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myself Dan Fellars alia losa and Kamille
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parks are all back together again and
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excited for a new season this is this
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is what i i call the goat season
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it’s season if you want to know where
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i stand on lebron this is jorDan
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I am a child of the nineties.
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So JorDan is my, is my era.
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Well, we are, um, good, excited to,
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to be back with you and, um,
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and go through it.
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We are changing things a little bit.
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I’ll walk through kind of our new format.
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One of the reasons why I decided to
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kind of take a break one, well,
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a lot of, a lot of things, uh,
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Things just got busy at work.
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I was engaged in a very large enterprise
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rollout with a client and it was awesome.
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I got back into building directly in
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Airtable.
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I hadn’t been doing that as much
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previously.
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And so I feel like I’m very much
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back in the weeds and know the ins
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and outs of Airtable.
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That’s exciting.
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A lot more I can share throughout the
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season of things.
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But anyways, it was very busy, demanding,
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and that was a big part of it.
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And then just kind of changes in strategy
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and where my focus was.
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But it’s a new year.
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I’m recommitted to
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to um spending time with with built on
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air as well as with our primary sponsor
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On2Air and focusing on those and um
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so reached out to ali and Kamille was
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like let’s do it they were all on
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board excited and uh so here we are
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so one thing that is going to change
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um we’re going to kind of
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focus in and be more specific on each
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on each episode.
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And so instead of doing maybe a full
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hour worth of different of in the past,
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we had four segments per show.
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We’re now just going to focus and just
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do one thing each week that will allow
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us to spend more time on it and
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and be a little bit easier to manage
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and and coordinate everything and so that
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was one of the other things is is
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the the production side of getting the
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show together was was taking a bit more
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time so with this change in focus i
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think it’ll be a little bit easier to
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manage and i think better it’ll allow us
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to to go deeper in each topic um
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so the general format is the first of
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each month we’re gonna give an update on
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all the latest things this one will be
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a bit more
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extensive because we’ve been off for six
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months but we’ll do a monthly round the
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bases and talk about all the latest news
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and updates and new features and things
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like that then we’ll do two weeks of
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deep diving into a product demo or feature
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highlight a feature or showcase something
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that that one of us have built
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and just go spend more time really
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showcasing the ins and outs of the use
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case and demo.
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And then the last one of the month,
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we’ll bring somebody on and do a guest
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highlight and showcase what somebody in
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the community has built.
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So if that’s you,
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we’d love to hear from you.
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We have not filled out our roster yet
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for this season,
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but we’ll keep it the same format.
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We’ll do eight weeks straight,
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and then we’ll take a month off.
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So we’ll be two months on,
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one month off on this new format.
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So we’ll repeat it each month.
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The four shows we’ll repeat twice for the
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season.
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So that’s the new format.
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And with that,
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and we’re transitioning because of the
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change,
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some things broke in the Airtable
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environment,
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haven’t had time to rebuild it.
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That’ll be a focus for this year as
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well,
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is kind of reimagine some of the assets
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that we use for the show and things
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like that.
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So we’re kind of going casual today.
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I don’t have all the segment slides and
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everything,
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so we’re going to keep it nice and
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casual for today’s show.
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But yeah,
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any updates on your guys and what you
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guys have been up to the last six
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months?
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Complaining into the void about Airtable.
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Yeah, it’s an ongoing, it’s a daily,
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daily topic.
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Oh yeah, absolutely.
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I’ve also been really excited about a lot
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of the updates though.
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But outside of Airtable,
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my son turned two, which is crazy.
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And yeah,
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that’s really the biggest life update on
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my end.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And we were saying earlier that we saw
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each other again at Dare Table in Chicago.
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That’s always fun.
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Yeah.
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And saw a lot of people that are
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watching, I’m sure, as well.
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It was awesome.
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It’s always great to connect with
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everybody at Dare Table.
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Really fun stuff.
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Yeah, that’s good.
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yeah so yeah my my end on personal
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life uh you’ll see a different background
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i moved i’ve been i decided to um
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i decided to i’ve got four kids two
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of them are in college now and uh
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so i only have two still at home
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and so we have a little bit more
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space at the house so i decided to
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to partition one of the rooms into my
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office.
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And so now I work from home.
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As of yesterday,
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yesterday was my first day kind of setting
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up.
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I still have a lot to clean up
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and set up,
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So yeah,
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that was a big change after having worked
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in an office outside the house for ten
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plus years doing that.
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Part of it is because my oldest is
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engaged and now I got to pay for
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a wedding.
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Yeah.
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So that’ll be in May.
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We’ve got a wedding coming up.
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So that’s soon.
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We got an eldest daughter.
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Yay.
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So yeah, that’s exciting.
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We like, like her fiance, so that’s good.
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You’re going to use Airtable to help her
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plan the wedding.
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I told her to,
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I told her she needs to,
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she’s interned for me over the years.
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So she’s familiar with it.
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So we’ll see if she does or not.
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Yeah.
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Cool.
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Cool.
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Well, let’s get started.
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So I thought I would,
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let me share my screen.
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Um,
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I’ve forgotten how to do this.
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It’s been so long.
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It’s been so long.
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I know.
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No, it’s not working.
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Okay, that will work.
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Okay,
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now we want to go to this format.
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Is it not showing?
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It’s not showing.
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Why are you not showing?
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Shoot.
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Yeah,
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it like moved as though it was about
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to start showing something and then just
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didn’t.
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Yeah.
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Black screen.
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I didn’t, let me see the browser,
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try capturing different screen.
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I think I know why.
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Hold on just a second.
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No problem.
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There’s a big long list of what’s new
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to go over, which is exciting.
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It felt almost like they waited until we
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stopped the show to be like, okay,
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let’s introduce everything.
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i may uh drop out for just a
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second so all right we can chat about
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all the new stuff get us started uh
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yeah they basically released like so many
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things that people have been asking for
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for years like from the beginning like
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several big big big ticket items which are
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super exciting there’s a couple and the
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Kind of sad thing is one of the
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ones I was most excited about is a
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little buggy, at least it is right now.
[00:08:33]
I’m sure they’re going to address the sort
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of jankiness of it.
[00:08:38]
But for me,
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it was the nested conditions in an
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automation where you can have a loop
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inside of a condition or the other way
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around.
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That’s been so helpful,
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especially since the cap for automations
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is still fifty.
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So you get to, you know,
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be a little bit more advanced while
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staying in Airtable and not using a third
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party.
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Absolutely.
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Or you have to having to use a
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script,
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which is generally my only option if I
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need to do that.
[00:09:14]
And now I can use the built-in tools,
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which is awesome.
[00:09:19]
One thing that Russ pointed out is you
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can’t do a loop inside a loop,
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which would be incredibly useful.
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Maybe someday.
[00:09:33]
It is working,
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but only if I share a single tab,
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which is crazy.
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So I’m going to have to put all
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the URLs into the single tab.
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So we’ll make that work.
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Interesting.
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Well, anyways, let’s get started.
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So yeah, around the bases,
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get you up to date on everything going
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on.
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So I thought I’d start.
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This is a tweet from Howie Liu,
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CEO of Airtable back in June,
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which is around the time we ended.
[00:10:02]
And he kind of set the stage and
[00:10:04]
basically said,
[00:10:06]
decided to do a relaunch of Airtable as
[00:10:09]
the AI native app platform.
[00:10:11]
I don’t know if you remember this big
[00:10:12]
announcement that Airtable made.
[00:10:16]
I think this was when we were in
[00:10:18]
LA, I think it’s when they announced this.
[00:10:20]
Is that right?
[00:10:22]
Is that what you remember?
[00:10:25]
At the LA conference for Airtable.
[00:10:26]
That sounds right.
[00:10:30]
But anyways,
[00:10:30]
so it kind of like sets the stage
[00:10:32]
of like Airtable really trying to be an
[00:10:35]
AI platform.
[00:10:38]
And, you know,
[00:10:39]
I wouldn’t call it a relaunch of Airtable,
[00:10:41]
although that’s kind of the wording that
[00:10:43]
Howard Hughes is here and they kind of
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use in their marketing.
[00:10:46]
They definitely have added more.
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I think there’s still room to go,
[00:10:50]
but general sense of like where Airtable
[00:10:53]
and AI fit together.
[00:10:54]
What are your kind of thoughts the last
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year or so of Airtable’s evolution?
[00:11:00]
It’s gotten so much better.
[00:11:03]
It has.
[00:11:04]
And they just added to the What’s New
[00:11:06]
page even more AI of like,
[00:11:09]
you can now search using Omni in like
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the regular search capabilities.
[00:11:15]
So they’re adding it to more and more
[00:11:18]
places throughout the product.
[00:11:19]
So it doesn’t feel such like a one-off
[00:11:21]
little feature over here.
[00:11:23]
It’s kind of, it’s everywhere.
[00:11:24]
Yeah.
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Yeah.
[00:11:26]
Absolutely.
[00:11:27]
And I have really enjoyed seeing a lot
[00:11:29]
of the places that they’re putting it.
[00:11:30]
Like there’s on interfaces,
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you can have a button now,
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like open Omni with a prompt already put
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into it, which I find really interesting.
[00:11:40]
There’s a lot of cool things you can
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do with that.
[00:11:42]
But I also have found it really annoying
[00:11:44]
in other cases.
[00:11:45]
Like now when you click on like a,
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even if it’s a formula field,
[00:11:50]
like in a cell,
[00:11:51]
the output of a formula text,
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the little thing that comes up,
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it’s like rewrite with Omni.
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and i’m like you can’t rewrite the output
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of a formula unless i’m like i don’t
[00:12:01]
it just doesn’t make sense there so yeah
[00:12:04]
but yeah still exciting stuff um yeah and
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we’ll and we’ll dig into the specific
[00:12:11]
features uh throughout this episode but
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yeah overall i mean i think everybody you
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know it’s i think every software company
[00:12:19]
is is kind of going through this evolution
[00:12:22]
of what does it mean to
[00:12:24]
to be AI native.
[00:12:27]
Yeah, but so it is kind of interesting.
[00:12:32]
All right, we got one more.
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This one’s on the technical side.
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This is from the Airtable engineering
[00:12:38]
blog.
[00:12:39]
I always like to see when they post
[00:12:41]
on here.
[00:12:42]
We won’t get into the weeds.
[00:12:43]
This is very technical.
[00:12:44]
How we reduced archive storage costs by
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one hundred X and saved millions.
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Now hopefully they reduce prices for
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customers to take advantage of the
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millions they saved.
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That would be nice.
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Yeah.
[00:12:59]
But if you’d like to know the underworking
[00:13:02]
of,
[00:13:03]
of how Airtable is built under the hood,
[00:13:06]
this kind of pulls back the curtain a
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little bit.
[00:13:08]
And, um,
[00:13:10]
I just kind of skimmed through it.
[00:13:11]
I didn’t read all of it.
[00:13:12]
I’m not as familiar with,
[00:13:13]
with some of these technologies, but, uh,
[00:13:17]
it’s kind of interesting to get the behind
[00:13:20]
the scenes yeah i attempted to read this
[00:13:24]
and i didn’t understand it but it was
[00:13:27]
interesting especially since they kind of
[00:13:28]
call out that in addition to storing your
[00:13:31]
data you know that you can see pretty
[00:13:34]
readily think of all the other things that
[00:13:36]
Airtable needs to keep track of for
[00:13:38]
you like the revision history and
[00:13:40]
snapshots and all of that data and i
[00:13:44]
think that’s
[00:13:45]
largely or a lot of what they mean
[00:13:47]
by archive storage, not like your base.
[00:13:50]
It’s everything underneath your base that
[00:13:52]
keeps it sort of running in the
[00:13:54]
background.
[00:13:54]
So that’s a lot of information,
[00:13:58]
especially since like if you think about
[00:14:01]
if you’re on an enterprise,
[00:14:03]
the maximum record I think is like five
[00:14:05]
hundred thousand.
[00:14:07]
And if you’re at that limit and you
[00:14:08]
have thirty snapshots that are at that
[00:14:11]
limit,
[00:14:12]
they still have to store all that data
[00:14:14]
until your snapshot expires.
[00:14:15]
So it’s just a lot of data to
[00:14:19]
even consider for a single customer and
[00:14:21]
interesting to kind of vaguely understand
[00:14:25]
how they modified stuff.
[00:14:26]
Yeah.
[00:14:28]
Yep.
[00:14:31]
All right.
[00:14:31]
Next one.
[00:14:32]
Okay.
[00:14:34]
This is one.
[00:14:35]
Another thing that happened while we were
[00:14:37]
away was an Airtable community-led
[00:14:39]
hackathon.
[00:14:41]
I think, Allie, you were a judge.
[00:14:43]
Kamille, were you a judge?
[00:14:44]
I sure was.
[00:14:45]
OK, tell us about it.
[00:14:47]
And Ben Green was also a judge.
[00:14:48]
Yeah, and Ben Green.
[00:14:49]
Tell us about this.
[00:14:51]
Very fun.
[00:14:54]
Yes, it was incredible.
[00:14:57]
We had a ton of amazing submissions.
[00:15:07]
That was just the coolest thing to me,
[00:15:08]
was going through all of them.
[00:15:10]
So thank you to everybody who put the
[00:15:15]
time in to submit something.
[00:15:16]
I had so much fun looking at all
[00:15:18]
of those.
[00:15:19]
And thank you to Mike Simmons,
[00:15:20]
who really was the brains behind putting
[00:15:23]
all of this together with Automatic
[00:15:25]
Nation.
[00:15:28]
Really, really cool idea,
[00:15:29]
and we probably will do it again in
[00:15:30]
the future.
[00:15:32]
But there were a lot of really cool
[00:15:33]
custom interfaces, lots of AI,
[00:15:36]
a ton of games.
[00:15:37]
I was going to say,
[00:15:38]
multiple people built whole functioning
[00:15:41]
games as part of their submission,
[00:15:45]
and there were…
[00:15:47]
This was difficult because there were
[00:15:49]
multiple awards given as part of the
[00:15:51]
hackathon, but Ali, myself,
[00:15:54]
and Ben Green were judging for just one
[00:15:56]
of the awards,
[00:15:57]
which we could only give to one
[00:15:58]
submission.
[00:15:59]
And we had to do a rating system
[00:16:03]
and then do a top three and then
[00:16:04]
discuss.
[00:16:05]
It was not easy to pick which of
[00:16:08]
the many,
[00:16:08]
many submissions really sort of packed the
[00:16:11]
biggest punch overall.
[00:16:12]
There were so many that were like,
[00:16:14]
good ideas and so many that were like
[00:16:17]
very good Airtable implementations and
[00:16:19]
Benefit Bridge,
[00:16:20]
which is the one that we selected was
[00:16:22]
the best of both worlds.
[00:16:24]
It was like a really good cause that
[00:16:26]
was using Airtable and it was largely just
[00:16:30]
Airtable and not like use these ten other
[00:16:33]
tools to build something good.
[00:16:35]
It was like,
[00:16:36]
here’s what you could do in Airtable and,
[00:16:39]
you know,
[00:16:39]
make something that benefits your
[00:16:41]
community.
[00:16:42]
Their video was really well put together
[00:16:44]
as well.
[00:16:45]
It was like a really good showcase of
[00:16:47]
exactly what their interface does and
[00:16:53]
everything.
[00:16:53]
There were just so many cool ones.
[00:16:56]
So was it,
[00:16:57]
so Airtable voted on one for AI and
[00:17:01]
then this was the kind of community most
[00:17:03]
likes.
[00:17:03]
And then this was the one that you
[00:17:06]
guys chose.
[00:17:07]
Yeah.
[00:17:08]
Erica came very close to sweeping.
[00:17:10]
She was really, I really loved her,
[00:17:13]
her submission as well.
[00:17:14]
She had those Omni buttons to like help
[00:17:16]
her create workout plans.
[00:17:17]
And like, it was, it was really cool.
[00:17:20]
All of the submissions,
[00:17:22]
you can watch the creators of each of
[00:17:25]
them.
[00:17:26]
They have like a demo video on YouTube
[00:17:27]
where Dan is sort of highlighting right
[00:17:29]
now on screen.
[00:17:31]
I would highly recommend,
[00:17:32]
you don’t maybe have to watch all of
[00:17:34]
them,
[00:17:34]
but like read through some of the
[00:17:35]
descriptions and then watch the videos.
[00:17:37]
They’re all five minutes or shorter.
[00:17:40]
Some of them are really like,
[00:17:43]
Honestly,
[00:17:44]
Greg the Virtual Frog was my personal
[00:17:46]
favorite.
[00:17:48]
I loved that one.
[00:17:49]
It’s like, it was just very,
[00:17:52]
some of these were just really like,
[00:17:54]
I would never have thought to do this.
[00:17:58]
But they did it.
[00:18:00]
Rob’s Thanksgiving turkey tracker was
[00:18:02]
good, too.
[00:18:04]
That was a fun one.
[00:18:06]
I also really loved, I believe,
[00:18:09]
Walker Milhone was his name.
[00:18:11]
It was towards the top.
[00:18:12]
It was a ranch, a cattle ranch,
[00:18:16]
large-scale ranch management.
[00:18:17]
That one was wild.
[00:18:19]
Like, very, very cool.
[00:18:22]
I could go on and on.
[00:18:22]
Literally,
[00:18:23]
I could say something great about all of
[00:18:24]
them.
[00:18:24]
Just high quality all around.
[00:18:28]
Yes.
[00:18:29]
And these are just great ways to learn.
[00:18:31]
Yeah.
[00:18:31]
Like you’ll learn how people set things up
[00:18:33]
and get good ideas.
[00:18:35]
So always good to review real world use
[00:18:37]
cases.
[00:18:40]
I think before we were on,
[00:18:43]
we were talking about custom interfaces.
[00:18:46]
And if you want to see someone going
[00:18:50]
ham on a custom interface,
[00:18:52]
watch the recipe for disaster one where
[00:18:55]
they built D&D and it does not look
[00:18:58]
like your table.
[00:18:59]
It’s crazy.
[00:19:01]
The colors are like… I was like,
[00:19:04]
what is this?
[00:19:05]
Very cool.
[00:19:05]
Yes.
[00:19:09]
Okay.
[00:19:09]
Maybe we’ll have to reach out to some
[00:19:11]
of these to come on the show and
[00:19:13]
show what they built.
[00:19:15]
Yeah.
[00:19:16]
Absolutely.
[00:19:17]
We have had a couple of them on
[00:19:19]
as guests before,
[00:19:20]
including Andres Villaveses.
[00:19:21]
His architecture one was very cool.
[00:19:26]
Yes.
[00:19:28]
Cool.
[00:19:28]
Awesome.
[00:19:28]
And it looks like they’re going to do
[00:19:31]
it again in March.
[00:19:32]
Yay.
[00:19:32]
Maybe.
[00:19:35]
Okay,
[00:19:35]
so another hackathon coming in a few
[00:19:37]
months.
[00:19:38]
So start getting ready.
[00:19:42]
All right, with that,
[00:19:44]
let’s start talking about some new
[00:19:46]
features in Airtable that have come out.
[00:19:50]
So a lot of these might feel like
[00:19:52]
they’ve been around forever,
[00:19:53]
but we’re gonna kind of talk through
[00:19:55]
Some of them that,
[00:19:57]
first I’m gonna highlight the ones that
[00:19:58]
people found in the BuiltOnAir community
[00:20:04]
and posted kind of before they were
[00:20:06]
announced.
[00:20:08]
I guess we’re starting with mine.
[00:20:09]
I didn’t intend that, but I remember,
[00:20:11]
yeah, one day I was like,
[00:20:13]
Holy cow, this is new.
[00:20:15]
This show display name instead of primary
[00:20:18]
field.
[00:20:19]
And then you can pick the field.
[00:20:20]
And I think we’ll talk.
[00:20:22]
We’ll go deep into this.
[00:20:24]
Maybe we’ll even show it.
[00:20:25]
Because I know, Kamille,
[00:20:27]
you’ve got some opinions on this.
[00:20:31]
But yeah, I was like, wow,
[00:20:33]
I know people have been wanting this for
[00:20:35]
years and the ramifications of it are big.
[00:20:38]
I haven’t fully fleshed out the extent of
[00:20:42]
what this means.
[00:20:43]
So yeah, that was a big one.
[00:20:46]
I got a lot of interest there as
[00:20:48]
well.
[00:20:50]
That is crazy.
[00:20:51]
Yeah.
[00:20:51]
I haven’t even tried it yet.
[00:20:53]
Just like, I don’t know.
[00:20:55]
I feel like there’s, it comes with,
[00:20:57]
I have so many questions about it that
[00:20:58]
I haven’t had the time to try and
[00:21:00]
answer yet.
[00:21:00]
Yeah.
[00:21:01]
Yeah.
[00:21:03]
Okay.
[00:21:04]
There’s another one.
[00:21:05]
Actually, I think I can.
[00:21:09]
Garrett in the chat asked how to find
[00:21:13]
the community hackathon link.
[00:21:16]
And that’s just
[00:21:18]
hackathon.airtabletemplate.com.
[00:21:20]
Yep.
[00:21:20]
You can put it in there.
[00:21:24]
Yes.
[00:21:32]
There we go.
[00:21:32]
Okay.
[00:21:32]
Let’s get the next one.
[00:21:43]
Oh, sorry.
[00:21:46]
In the meantime,
[00:21:47]
a Ben Bailey’s excellent gift choice.
[00:21:52]
Dang it, it opened up.
[00:21:54]
Okay, I gotta find them.
[00:21:56]
They’re in here.
[00:22:00]
And whatever you’re pulling up is probably
[00:22:02]
Ben Bailey’s discovery.
[00:22:05]
It’s him and Russ in our Built on
[00:22:07]
Air community are the two that tend to
[00:22:10]
find things first.
[00:22:11]
Yeah.
[00:22:12]
Okay.
[00:22:12]
There’s one from Kamille.
[00:22:13]
Oh, what?
[00:22:15]
The improvement that came this morning.
[00:22:17]
Never mind.
[00:22:17]
Labs for detail pages.
[00:22:18]
The title field remains sticky at the top
[00:22:21]
of the header.
[00:22:21]
Yes.
[00:22:22]
You won’t lose track.
[00:22:24]
We aren’t seeing that on the screen,
[00:22:25]
just so you know.
[00:22:26]
Oh, you’re not, okay.
[00:22:28]
Yeah, but this one,
[00:22:29]
I forgot about this one because this one
[00:22:31]
was one of the ones that was silently
[00:22:32]
announced.
[00:22:34]
It’s one of my favorite little updates
[00:22:40]
because for the longest time,
[00:22:42]
the original side sheets and detail pages,
[00:22:46]
they would have the ability to have a
[00:22:48]
sticky header where you could put anything
[00:22:50]
in there.
[00:22:51]
And then the newer version of detail pages
[00:22:55]
were slowly but surely improved in
[00:22:58]
practically every capacity that like
[00:23:00]
surpassed the original,
[00:23:02]
except you couldn’t figure out what record
[00:23:05]
you were on if you had a very
[00:23:06]
long detail page.
[00:23:07]
And where I work, we often did.
[00:23:10]
And one day I just scrolled down and
[00:23:12]
I was like, oh, my God.
[00:23:15]
It’s time.
[00:23:17]
So it’s still not,
[00:23:18]
you still can’t put anything and
[00:23:19]
everything in that sticky header like you
[00:23:21]
used to be able to,
[00:23:22]
but the name of the record,
[00:23:23]
and if you have a button that’s at
[00:23:25]
the very, very top,
[00:23:26]
those buttons go down with you.
[00:23:28]
So pretty nice.
[00:23:30]
Yep.
[00:23:31]
Yeah,
[00:23:32]
and I don’t think that shows up there.
[00:23:34]
Okay.
[00:23:36]
Let’s do this one.
[00:23:38]
Okay, here’s one from Russ.
[00:23:41]
These minor controls to be able to set
[00:23:43]
the…
[00:23:45]
This is in interfaces.
[00:23:49]
I’m not sure about this one.
[00:23:51]
What is…
[00:23:52]
Because it’s just on two lines versus how
[00:23:56]
tall you can make it.
[00:23:57]
So this example feels a little silly,
[00:24:01]
but it is like… Ah, gotcha.
[00:24:05]
So this is like a short view and
[00:24:07]
this is the extra tall.
[00:24:08]
Yeah.
[00:24:10]
This is one of the ones,
[00:24:11]
the height of the headers,
[00:24:14]
I think has been requested since,
[00:24:17]
if not day one,
[00:24:18]
pretty close to day one of Airtable’s
[00:24:20]
existence.
[00:24:21]
And…
[00:24:24]
I just never,
[00:24:25]
I never thought I’d see the day because
[00:24:27]
so long had passed and they redesigned the
[00:24:30]
grid view twice in the time that I’ve
[00:24:32]
been an Airtable user and they didn’t do
[00:24:34]
it.
[00:24:34]
So I was like, okay,
[00:24:35]
it’s never going to happen.
[00:24:36]
Then they did it.
[00:24:38]
Very useful.
[00:24:39]
It is, I do find it very useful,
[00:24:42]
but I also have found it a little
[00:24:44]
annoying to get used to.
[00:24:46]
If you’re on data layer in the grid,
[00:24:49]
if you’re clicking,
[00:24:50]
I often am clicking on the header,
[00:24:52]
highlight, and then it does this,
[00:24:54]
and then all of a sudden I’m like,
[00:24:56]
ah!
[00:24:57]
Yeah, or I’m trying to like click,
[00:24:58]
double click it to go into edit mode,
[00:25:00]
but it makes it bigger.
[00:25:01]
Yep.
[00:25:02]
Yep.
[00:25:04]
So this one is at the interface level.
[00:25:08]
But it’s kind of interesting.
[00:25:09]
You can’t set this in the edit mode.
[00:25:13]
This is for the user to pick.
[00:25:15]
Yeah.
[00:25:16]
So you can set the default and the
[00:25:19]
end user can adjust it on their end.
[00:25:23]
This one was useful.
[00:25:25]
It wasn’t necessarily one of the ones that
[00:25:27]
I was looking for necessarily,
[00:25:30]
but it has since come up with some
[00:25:32]
of my stakeholders.
[00:25:33]
So this is also another appreciated
[00:25:36]
change.
[00:25:38]
Yeah,
[00:25:38]
I like that budget quantity is a perfect
[00:25:40]
example for me where it’s like ordinarily
[00:25:42]
you’d have to have that super wide with
[00:25:44]
a small number and that would really
[00:25:46]
bother me.
[00:25:46]
So now I’m excited about it.
[00:25:49]
I distinctly remember I had a stakeholder
[00:25:51]
who I built
[00:25:53]
a couple of interfaces for them,
[00:25:54]
all the same project,
[00:25:56]
let’s just call it twenty pages or so,
[00:25:59]
several grids, and they were like, okay,
[00:26:02]
can you make the default width of all
[00:26:04]
these columns as narrow as possible,
[00:26:06]
just so I could see as much data
[00:26:07]
as possible?
[00:26:08]
And I was like,
[00:26:09]
it’s going to cut off all the names
[00:26:10]
of your columns.
[00:26:11]
And he was like,
[00:26:12]
I’ll have to deal with it.
[00:26:13]
And now,
[00:26:15]
he can know what column he’s looking at
[00:26:17]
without hovering and waiting for the
[00:26:18]
tooltip.
[00:26:19]
So, very, very helpful.
[00:26:21]
Yeah.
[00:26:22]
Also the wrap header features,
[00:26:23]
that’s very nice as well.
[00:26:30]
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:26:31]
Love it.
[00:26:31]
All right.
[00:26:31]
Okay, next one.
[00:26:33]
So this is Airtable’s announcement that
[00:26:36]
they now have the ability to have a
[00:26:39]
ChatGPT add-on, I think they call them,
[00:26:43]
that will talk to your Airtable
[00:26:45]
environment.
[00:26:46]
You have to configure it in ChatGPT and
[00:26:50]
it will be able to pull data from
[00:26:52]
your Airtable base and use that as part
[00:26:55]
of your chat experience.
[00:26:57]
Any of you tried that yet?
[00:26:58]
I haven’t.
[00:26:59]
Nope.
[00:27:00]
I haven’t either.
[00:27:04]
I could see it being useful for like,
[00:27:09]
maybe for big teams in particular,
[00:27:12]
if you’re like, hey,
[00:27:13]
when was the last time this project was
[00:27:14]
updated or like whatever, just asking,
[00:27:18]
but I don’t know.
[00:27:20]
Yeah.
[00:27:20]
Yeah.
[00:27:21]
Chat with your data is a pretty big,
[00:27:23]
like,
[00:27:24]
selling point I think for a lot of
[00:27:26]
people and it’s interesting because
[00:27:28]
Airtable late I think after this one was
[00:27:31]
released added a bunch of things to Omni
[00:27:33]
that would be the thing I would suspect
[00:27:37]
you would use this for the ChatGPT
[00:27:39]
extension but of course Omni can only look
[00:27:43]
at Airtable and ChatGPT could look at a
[00:27:45]
bunch of other things as well so it’s
[00:27:47]
really like well how much are you trying
[00:27:50]
to do in your use case and that
[00:27:51]
will determine which one you use
[00:27:54]
Love to do an experiment to ask them
[00:27:56]
both the same question and see which one’s
[00:28:00]
more accurate.
[00:28:02]
I’ve found Omni to be sometimes not
[00:28:04]
accurate at all about my own data.
[00:28:07]
And I’m like, we’ll see.
[00:28:12]
Yeah, that would be interesting.
[00:28:15]
So yeah, if you used it,
[00:28:16]
let us know what your experience is with
[00:28:18]
it.
[00:28:21]
Okay, now let’s go through,
[00:28:24]
refresh this page.
[00:28:27]
Let’s go through all the what’s new.
[00:28:31]
Maybe, should we start most recent?
[00:28:35]
Start most recent.
[00:28:36]
Yeah,
[00:28:36]
I kind of alluded to this one earlier
[00:28:39]
of like, in search and filters,
[00:28:41]
those are now Omni enabled.
[00:28:43]
So you can like,
[00:28:45]
In a sentence,
[00:28:46]
what are you trying to see?
[00:28:47]
And Omni will try and build a filter
[00:28:48]
for it.
[00:28:49]
This one was released, I think,
[00:28:53]
yesterday or something.
[00:28:54]
So I haven’t been able to use it
[00:28:56]
personally.
[00:28:56]
But it seems like it’d be pretty good
[00:28:58]
for who I would call my stakeholders or
[00:29:04]
for consultants who you would call your
[00:29:06]
end users,
[00:29:07]
just people who are not used to or
[00:29:10]
don’t like building filters in Airtable.
[00:29:13]
Just describe in a sentence what you want,
[00:29:15]
and this feature is supposed to be able
[00:29:17]
to replicate that.
[00:29:21]
Yeah.
[00:29:21]
Yeah, I don’t know.
[00:29:24]
For me,
[00:29:24]
I think it’s like a foray into…
[00:29:27]
you know,
[00:29:28]
the thing that’s changing about software
[00:29:29]
is WYSIWYG drag and drop to do everything
[00:29:33]
to now being prompt based.
[00:29:35]
And like,
[00:29:35]
this is kind of a foray to bridge
[00:29:37]
that gap where you can do it either
[00:29:38]
way.
[00:29:39]
And I think eventually more and more,
[00:29:41]
you know,
[00:29:41]
adding fields and everything else is going
[00:29:44]
to potentially be prompt driven.
[00:29:46]
So we’ll just see this evolution.
[00:29:51]
And this is kind of just one easy
[00:29:53]
spot that could start with.
[00:29:55]
I feel like more and more people are
[00:29:57]
going to just be talking to their
[00:29:58]
computers because it’s just going to be,
[00:30:00]
it’s like not easy to type all these
[00:30:02]
prompts out.
[00:30:02]
Like dictation is going to be way more
[00:30:06]
of a big thing in the future.
[00:30:07]
I’ve already moved to just when I’m at
[00:30:10]
home, it’s all dictation.
[00:30:11]
I don’t want to type.
[00:30:13]
Yeah.
[00:30:14]
I use the dictation on the,
[00:30:15]
on chat GPT directly a lot, but yeah.
[00:30:19]
Yeah.
[00:30:20]
And if you, you guys use whisper flow,
[00:30:23]
that’s the, it’s pretty cool.
[00:30:25]
A little bit, yeah.
[00:30:26]
Yeah,
[00:30:27]
I’m starting to adopt that more and more.
[00:30:32]
Yeah, I agree.
[00:30:33]
Everything is going to be voice-activated
[00:30:37]
and driven.
[00:30:40]
OK, next one.
[00:30:42]
Display names.
[00:30:42]
OK, so we talked about this,
[00:30:44]
so display name.
[00:30:46]
So yeah, tell us, Kamille,
[00:30:48]
what your experience has been.
[00:30:50]
So this is a great idea.
[00:30:53]
a little bit poorly executed.
[00:30:56]
And I say that a little bit.
[00:31:00]
I know Airtable would never, right?
[00:31:01]
Such a surprise.
[00:31:03]
But yeah,
[00:31:05]
I’ve just noticed that it’s a little bit,
[00:31:11]
you wouldn’t expect,
[00:31:12]
or at least I wouldn’t expect some of
[00:31:14]
the outcomes I’ve seen.
[00:31:15]
Like it does as says, right?
[00:31:19]
That’s not the part that’s buggy,
[00:31:20]
but like,
[00:31:22]
There’s a little bit of difference now
[00:31:24]
when you’re copying and pasting into a
[00:31:26]
linked record field.
[00:31:29]
Before you could do the record ID or
[00:31:32]
the primary field.
[00:31:34]
Now it’s the record ID or whatever is
[00:31:36]
your display field.
[00:31:38]
And if you use
[00:31:43]
like it’s i’ve noticed that it’s possible
[00:31:46]
to accidentally create new records even
[00:31:50]
though they match the either the primary
[00:31:53]
field or the code name field when you’re
[00:31:57]
doing that copying and pasting and i’ve
[00:31:59]
also noticed that if you copy and paste
[00:32:03]
the primary field into a linked record
[00:32:06]
field and you have a different display
[00:32:08]
field or the other way around,
[00:32:11]
it will lock your field to now use
[00:32:14]
the other field as the display field until
[00:32:17]
you clear out that linked record and then
[00:32:20]
relink it.
[00:32:21]
It’s like it gets stuck.
[00:32:23]
which I don’t think is intended behavior
[00:32:25]
because you told the field to display a
[00:32:28]
specific name and it won’t until you clear
[00:32:31]
it out and start over.
[00:32:34]
And then the way this works in
[00:32:36]
automations, again,
[00:32:37]
you have to remember that what you paste
[00:32:41]
into the field has to be or should
[00:32:43]
be ideally the record ID, but if not,
[00:32:46]
the display field.
[00:32:47]
And there’s no indicator that that record
[00:32:50]
or that field is different.
[00:32:55]
Ideally in Airtable,
[00:32:57]
I get third parties not being able to
[00:32:59]
show you this as easily,
[00:33:00]
but in Airtable in an automation,
[00:33:03]
ideally there’d be some kind of like
[00:33:06]
adjustment they would make to the language
[00:33:08]
they give you of like the display field
[00:33:10]
is X, Y,
[00:33:11]
or Z because you can have ten linked
[00:33:14]
record fields all linked to the same table
[00:33:17]
and maybe only one of them has a
[00:33:18]
different display field or they all have a
[00:33:20]
different display field and you have to
[00:33:22]
keep track of that in your head.
[00:33:25]
Yeah, that’s, these are the questions.
[00:33:28]
Thank you, that I was wondering about.
[00:33:30]
Like,
[00:33:31]
so in that example of that screenshot
[00:33:33]
there,
[00:33:34]
could you take the value that they’re
[00:33:37]
showing under Jane Smith,
[00:33:38]
the TT two three nine eight, blah, blah,
[00:33:40]
blah.
[00:33:40]
Could you copy that and paste it into
[00:33:43]
the row below and have Jane Smith show
[00:33:45]
up?
[00:33:47]
I have a demo that I can switch
[00:33:50]
to if we want to just see this
[00:33:52]
feature in action just because it is
[00:33:54]
possible that in the time between I told
[00:33:58]
Dan, hey,
[00:33:58]
there’s a lot of stuff I have to
[00:34:00]
talk about this feature,
[00:34:01]
they might have fixed it.
[00:34:02]
So in their defense, maybe they fixed it.
[00:34:07]
In this example, context table,
[00:34:10]
you have a unique idea of some sort
[00:34:12]
for everybody that’s not pretty,
[00:34:14]
and you have what their names are.
[00:34:16]
And then I’m just going to create a
[00:34:18]
couple records and the, it’s still saving.
[00:34:23]
God, my internet.
[00:34:26]
Airtable was down yesterday.
[00:34:31]
Great to hear.
[00:34:35]
This is what your experience is like
[00:34:37]
normal where I haven’t made any
[00:34:39]
adjustments to my link record field.
[00:34:41]
I see the primary field show up and
[00:34:45]
not the prettier field that I want.
[00:34:48]
I can go in and change it to
[00:34:51]
be a different field.
[00:34:52]
This is only going to let you select
[00:34:55]
strings and I think you can still do
[00:34:57]
numbers, but no arrays,
[00:34:59]
obviously not the attachment field.
[00:35:04]
Was that formulas?
[00:35:05]
Yeah.
[00:35:05]
Can you do formulas?
[00:35:06]
Yeah, you can do formulas.
[00:35:07]
But it has to return, like,
[00:35:10]
a string or a number.
[00:35:12]
Dates you can do as well.
[00:35:14]
Just not, basically,
[00:35:15]
no arrays and no attachments.
[00:35:18]
Whatever could go in the primary field.
[00:35:20]
Yes.
[00:35:22]
So that’s still the same.
[00:35:23]
Like the underlying limitations are
[00:35:25]
probably still the same.
[00:35:27]
If I make that adjustment, well,
[00:35:28]
now I see my name up at the
[00:35:30]
top,
[00:35:30]
which is great for like your basic user
[00:35:33]
experience.
[00:35:34]
I’m going to say do that.
[00:35:38]
But what’s a little bizarre is like how
[00:35:45]
this works.
[00:35:46]
I’m just now remembering what my biggest
[00:35:48]
problem was.
[00:35:49]
I had…
[00:35:53]
a use case where we needed to have
[00:35:57]
a form that was shown to external users.
[00:36:02]
And it was very important that they not
[00:36:05]
see the like, in this case,
[00:36:08]
the unique ID.
[00:36:09]
We couldn’t turn it off.
[00:36:11]
So ideally, you would just do, okay,
[00:36:14]
I’m going to hide all of these fields
[00:36:18]
so that when the user uses the form,
[00:36:21]
they only see the name.
[00:36:23]
You’ll notice that unique ID is still
[00:36:25]
here.
[00:36:26]
It won’t let you take that away.
[00:36:28]
So you have to go to pills,
[00:36:30]
which is…
[00:36:31]
Now you can’t see it,
[00:36:32]
but I don’t want to use pills.
[00:36:33]
There were fields that I wanted to display
[00:36:35]
on the form that I couldn’t because it
[00:36:38]
would always show the primary field,
[00:36:41]
which was supposed to be hidden.
[00:36:43]
So there’s specific little things like
[00:36:46]
that.
[00:36:47]
And then one of the bigger pieces,
[00:36:50]
and I’m going to do this really,
[00:36:53]
really fast,
[00:36:55]
but
[00:36:57]
For me, again,
[00:36:58]
if you’re going under the assumption that
[00:37:00]
you’re showing people this is the name of
[00:37:03]
the contact,
[00:37:05]
if you try and add a filter,
[00:37:08]
that filter reads the primary field.
[00:37:11]
Like it doesn’t recognize that everyone
[00:37:14]
knows Kamille as one thousand ABC and not
[00:37:18]
Kamille.
[00:37:20]
So I know that that will work,
[00:37:25]
but if I hand this off to somebody
[00:37:26]
else, they’re going to be like,
[00:37:27]
I don’t know how to filter this.
[00:37:29]
So there’s specific things about how this
[00:37:33]
is implemented throughout the product
[00:37:35]
where, in some cases,
[00:37:36]
it’s a little bit buggy.
[00:37:37]
In some cases, this isn’t a bug,
[00:37:40]
but this is confusing.
[00:37:42]
And I would prefer if I had a
[00:37:46]
filter that it recognized
[00:37:49]
Airtable knows that I’ve changed this
[00:37:51]
setting.
[00:37:51]
So show that to me everywhere.
[00:37:55]
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:37:56]
I mean, I wonder,
[00:37:57]
it’s interesting that they chose to do
[00:37:59]
this at a linked record field level.
[00:38:03]
So you could do this on one table,
[00:38:05]
but not on another.
[00:38:06]
Like if you had two tables that are
[00:38:08]
linking to contacts.
[00:38:10]
um you could configure this on one of
[00:38:13]
the linked record fields and not on the
[00:38:14]
other one yeah all of them could have
[00:38:16]
different display fields so maybe they
[00:38:18]
were leaning towards flexibility but if
[00:38:21]
you’ve ever used hyper dbs hyper dbs have
[00:38:25]
a similar sort of setup but in my
[00:38:27]
opinion better implemented because it’s
[00:38:30]
globally for the table as a whole what
[00:38:33]
is the unique id field and what is
[00:38:35]
the display field and so everywhere you
[00:38:38]
would have a filter you would see the
[00:38:40]
display field
[00:38:42]
Yeah,
[00:38:43]
it’s a little bit of mismatch of how
[00:38:46]
they’ve kind of operated.
[00:38:48]
Like I could see why they chose to
[00:38:50]
make,
[00:38:50]
because it does make it more flexible and
[00:38:52]
maybe there’s like tables that are more
[00:38:55]
for utilities that you want it to show
[00:38:57]
the actual primary key or whatever,
[00:38:59]
but it does make it a little more
[00:39:01]
confusing because then it’s like you kind
[00:39:02]
of have to remember which fields you’re
[00:39:04]
using for what.
[00:39:05]
Yeah.
[00:39:07]
Thank you for sharing that.
[00:39:10]
Yeah,
[00:39:11]
it’s a little discouraging of using that.
[00:39:14]
It’s almost like it works at the data
[00:39:16]
layer but not at the interface layer.
[00:39:18]
Yeah.
[00:39:20]
Which is surprising.
[00:39:24]
Right.
[00:39:24]
All right, let’s keep going.
[00:39:30]
Okay, let’s see.
[00:39:33]
This is a big one, automation is nested.
[00:39:37]
I got access to this through the beta
[00:39:40]
and for months before it went live.
[00:39:42]
And I forgot that it wasn’t live for
[00:39:45]
everyone.
[00:39:45]
And so when this was announced,
[00:39:46]
I was like, oh yeah,
[00:39:47]
I can’t live without this anymore.
[00:39:51]
I feel like the week it became available
[00:39:53]
for me, it was flawless.
[00:39:55]
And then something happened.
[00:39:56]
And now if you drag and drop,
[00:39:58]
good luck,
[00:39:59]
you will get an error that will make
[00:40:00]
you refresh your page, at least for me.
[00:40:03]
So I don’t know what happened,
[00:40:05]
but there was a week of bliss.
[00:40:07]
where everything was perfect.
[00:40:08]
It does still work.
[00:40:11]
All of the animations I set up with
[00:40:12]
this feature haven’t been failing,
[00:40:15]
unless they would have failed anyway
[00:40:17]
without this feature.
[00:40:19]
But the drag and drop experience,
[00:40:21]
there’s some going on there.
[00:40:23]
But aside from that,
[00:40:24]
because I’m sure they’re going to fix it,
[00:40:26]
this overall might be like,
[00:40:29]
it might take the cake out of all
[00:40:30]
of the recent improvements.
[00:40:32]
It’s just so useful.
[00:40:34]
Yeah.
[00:40:34]
Yeah.
[00:40:34]
Yeah.
[00:40:36]
I wish it would go even further because
[00:40:38]
you can only go… There’s one scenario.
[00:40:42]
I can’t remember if it’s the loop first
[00:40:45]
versus conditional,
[00:40:46]
but there’s one scenario.
[00:40:48]
So you can loop and then you can
[00:40:50]
do a conditional.
[00:40:51]
I think in one variation,
[00:40:54]
you can actually go like a third level.
[00:40:56]
I feel like I saw that.
[00:41:01]
I don’t remember,
[00:41:02]
but you can do a condition inside a
[00:41:05]
condition.
[00:41:06]
And it only goes one layer deep.
[00:41:08]
You can’t keep doing that.
[00:41:10]
So condition inside a condition.
[00:41:12]
You can do a condition inside of a
[00:41:14]
loop, which is what’s pictured here.
[00:41:16]
And then you can do a condition,
[00:41:18]
and one of those conditions can have a
[00:41:21]
loop.
[00:41:21]
Now, that’s the part that upsets me.
[00:41:23]
You can’t have a loop for each condition,
[00:41:26]
which to me doesn’t make sense because
[00:41:28]
only one of them would run per automation
[00:41:31]
run.
[00:41:31]
I don’t know why they did that.
[00:41:34]
That’s probably where I saw it, yeah.
[00:41:37]
That’s where, how they’ve implemented.
[00:41:41]
So if they fix the drag and drop,
[00:41:45]
I would be fine with a lot of
[00:41:46]
my use cases,
[00:41:47]
but I would like to see it be
[00:41:49]
a little bit more,
[00:41:50]
I hate to say complete because it is
[00:41:54]
pretty good as is,
[00:41:55]
but if each condition could have its own
[00:41:58]
loop, that’d be great.
[00:41:59]
And if they really love us,
[00:42:01]
they’d give us loops inside of loops.
[00:42:04]
Yep.
[00:42:05]
And one last thing I would really love
[00:42:07]
is I want to be able to have
[00:42:09]
a, like,
[00:42:10]
ending step after the loop is done.
[00:42:14]
Like,
[00:42:15]
do the whole loop and then go update
[00:42:17]
the record that started everything.
[00:42:18]
Yes.
[00:42:18]
Exactly.
[00:42:20]
Yeah.
[00:42:22]
One of these days I might do a…
[00:42:24]
demo one of my workarounds that I’ve done
[00:42:26]
for that exact thing of I need to
[00:42:29]
mark something as complete,
[00:42:31]
but only after everything else is done.
[00:42:34]
And you can do it,
[00:42:36]
but it’s not easy or not as easy
[00:42:39]
as it should be.
[00:42:40]
And some of this also would have been
[00:42:43]
solved if, you know,
[00:42:45]
find record step is I think one of
[00:42:48]
the last places in Airtable where you can
[00:42:50]
put a filter,
[00:42:51]
but not a filter condition group.
[00:42:54]
yeah so i could have solved a lot
[00:42:56]
of my problems if they just let me
[00:42:59]
have a more complicated fine record step
[00:43:01]
but until then yeah that’s frustrating to
[00:43:06]
me too i often end up using a
[00:43:08]
script or a formula to like be like
[00:43:11]
okay if that’s that
[00:43:13]
So I was thinking it would also be
[00:43:16]
nice to know the index of the loop.
[00:43:18]
But they do run simultaneous.
[00:43:24]
They do.
[00:43:24]
I one time went through all the time
[00:43:25]
of setting that up.
[00:43:26]
And then it was like, OK,
[00:43:27]
is this the last one?
[00:43:29]
And then it was like, oh, well,
[00:43:30]
that one ran first.
[00:43:31]
So that doesn’t make any sense.
[00:43:35]
I’ve resorted to timestamps.
[00:43:38]
Yeah.
[00:43:42]
Yeah, that could work.
[00:43:44]
Okay, so this one’s, let’s see,
[00:43:46]
comment threads can get long.
[00:43:49]
So we’ve upgraded our comment summarize
[00:43:52]
feature instead of getting a generic
[00:43:54]
summary.
[00:43:54]
Now you can ask our AI assistant.
[00:43:57]
So basically now Omni can read through the
[00:44:00]
comments.
[00:44:01]
Yep.
[00:44:01]
Yep.
[00:44:04]
Yeah,
[00:44:06]
I don’t know if you guys heavily use
[00:44:07]
comments.
[00:44:08]
We kind of avoid them just because they’re
[00:44:10]
not well implemented.
[00:44:15]
I just ran into something yesterday where
[00:44:17]
the same kind of issue that’s been brought
[00:44:19]
up previously is one person has access to
[00:44:22]
interface A,
[00:44:23]
the other person has access to interface
[00:44:25]
B.
[00:44:25]
They both comment on a record and the
[00:44:28]
alert email they get doesn’t know where to
[00:44:30]
put them.
[00:44:31]
So we don’t use comments as much as
[00:44:36]
we could.
[00:44:40]
You know this feature.
[00:44:41]
I don’t know if I’m personally going to
[00:44:43]
use it,
[00:44:43]
but I do agree with the person you
[00:44:45]
just highlighted of sequential loops would
[00:44:48]
be awesome for automation.
[00:44:49]
Totally agree with that.
[00:44:55]
Very true.
[00:44:55]
OK, more Omni,
[00:44:56]
so they added some more buttons to Omni.
[00:45:00]
They’re just kind of some hyper pre.
[00:45:01]
Three ideas you could do.
[00:45:06]
This is the one that Ali alluded to
[00:45:07]
earlier.
[00:45:08]
This one,
[00:45:09]
although I’m not a big Omni user,
[00:45:11]
I think this one is a very good
[00:45:13]
idea.
[00:45:14]
In the same way that a button could
[00:45:15]
trigger a specific automation,
[00:45:18]
this will trigger a specific prompt.
[00:45:22]
So,
[00:45:22]
you don’t have to like write the same
[00:45:24]
prompt every single time.
[00:45:26]
So,
[00:45:27]
pretty nice and just adding on to what
[00:45:29]
buttons can do in interfaces.
[00:45:31]
To help your users guide them through
[00:45:33]
like, you know,
[00:45:34]
what they’re supposed to do,
[00:45:35]
which would be cool.
[00:45:38]
Yeah, that is cool.
[00:45:39]
I haven’t seen that one.
[00:45:41]
Sync and edit self-linked records across
[00:45:43]
bases.
[00:45:45]
This was funny.
[00:45:47]
This was released literally…
[00:45:49]
I so rarely use self-linked records,
[00:45:52]
but…
[00:45:53]
in the one use case that I was
[00:45:55]
using them,
[00:45:56]
I happened to sync them into another base
[00:45:58]
one day.
[00:45:59]
And like, I was like, oh yeah,
[00:46:00]
I can’t,
[00:46:01]
I can’t use the like new linked record
[00:46:03]
sync feature because it’s the self-linking
[00:46:05]
table.
[00:46:06]
And then the next day I go in
[00:46:08]
and I saw the little blue dot and
[00:46:10]
I was like, oh,
[00:46:13]
they really put this up here.
[00:46:15]
I was like,
[00:46:16]
I’m trying to remember,
[00:46:18]
I think it was before we our last
[00:46:21]
season when they added the backlink for
[00:46:24]
self-linked.
[00:46:25]
I think so.
[00:46:25]
Yeah.
[00:46:27]
But it was strange that when they finally
[00:46:31]
added.
[00:46:34]
They added that feature,
[00:46:35]
but it wasn’t compatible with editing
[00:46:37]
linked record fields downstream,
[00:46:40]
and I never understood why,
[00:46:41]
because
[00:46:43]
by definition,
[00:46:44]
you know that the synced table is there.
[00:46:46]
It’s the same table.
[00:46:48]
So why didn’t you start there and do
[00:46:52]
the other one later?
[00:46:53]
But now this is here.
[00:46:54]
So this one is not really a visual
[00:46:57]
change that you will notice necessarily,
[00:46:59]
but a good feature to bring everything up
[00:47:03]
to speed.
[00:47:03]
Yeah.
[00:47:03]
That one I actually found very useful.
[00:47:06]
Yeah.
[00:47:07]
Yeah.
[00:47:09]
OK.
[00:47:09]
Connect link records to your data library.
[00:47:14]
Yeah, so this is now,
[00:47:15]
if you are business or enterprise,
[00:47:17]
when you create a new link record field,
[00:47:19]
you’ll see all of the tables in your
[00:47:20]
base.
[00:47:20]
But then you could also directly link from
[00:47:24]
anything in your data library,
[00:47:25]
so like your saved data sets or your
[00:47:27]
hyper DBs.
[00:47:29]
And it will then add that thing as
[00:47:32]
a source or a table in your base
[00:47:34]
if it wasn’t already there.
[00:47:39]
I can see it being useful,
[00:47:40]
but for me, a lot of the time,
[00:47:42]
I would have brought it in if I
[00:47:43]
needed it anyway.
[00:47:44]
So it’s not like, for me,
[00:47:49]
it would already have been there if I
[00:47:50]
needed it.
[00:47:51]
Yeah.
[00:47:54]
Yeah, this is kind of,
[00:47:55]
and how it works, I’ve used this,
[00:47:58]
I was thinking that you could
[00:48:01]
that you could create a linked record that
[00:48:03]
doesn’t actually import the whole table.
[00:48:05]
Like,
[00:48:06]
but when you click on like add link,
[00:48:08]
it would show, you know, everything there,
[00:48:10]
but it actually does create a sync table.
[00:48:13]
So it’s basically just a shortcut to be
[00:48:15]
able to get that synced table into your
[00:48:18]
base.
[00:48:20]
Yeah.
[00:48:21]
So, yeah.
[00:48:22]
So it’s just kind of a time-saving thing.
[00:48:26]
Web prototype field agents.
[00:48:27]
So yeah, field agents,
[00:48:29]
this one’s kind of interesting.
[00:48:30]
I don’t know that a lot of people
[00:48:33]
were asking for this.
[00:48:34]
They must’ve had a customer that really
[00:48:37]
wanted this.
[00:48:38]
But yeah,
[00:48:39]
so there’s a field agent that basically
[00:48:41]
creates a mock-up based off of the data
[00:48:46]
and saves it as an image.
[00:48:51]
Yeah,
[00:48:52]
this one was one of the ones I
[00:48:54]
read it once it was like announced and
[00:48:57]
I was like, well, surely I misunderstood.
[00:49:01]
This doesn’t seem like everything we’ve
[00:49:03]
talked about before,
[00:49:04]
even the stuff I don’t use.
[00:49:05]
I’m like, yeah,
[00:49:06]
that’s a thing Airtable should do.
[00:49:08]
And this is one where I’m like,
[00:49:10]
why would you do that here?
[00:49:11]
Yeah.
[00:49:13]
Yeah.
[00:49:13]
I don’t know if they’re trying to compete
[00:49:15]
with like the, the bolts and the world,
[00:49:19]
you know, to try to be a,
[00:49:22]
you know, an AI web builder.
[00:49:26]
Don’t think that’s how most people would
[00:49:28]
use their table.
[00:49:31]
It is interesting.
[00:49:32]
Yeah.
[00:49:33]
Yeah.
[00:49:33]
I’d be curious who’s using that feature.
[00:49:36]
Form sections.
[00:49:38]
You can now create sections in the form
[00:49:40]
tab to group related forms together.
[00:49:43]
I think that’s supposed to be fields
[00:49:45]
together.
[00:49:46]
Forms.
[00:49:47]
They’re the… Oh, forms.
[00:49:48]
Gotcha.
[00:49:48]
Like view sections.
[00:49:49]
Yeah.
[00:49:49]
Okay.
[00:49:51]
So yeah.
[00:49:52]
So to organize your forms.
[00:49:54]
Yep.
[00:49:55]
Nothing crazy, but useful.
[00:49:56]
Yep.
[00:49:57]
Yep.
[00:49:58]
custom domains, okay?
[00:50:00]
So you can get your,
[00:50:02]
this is for your portal or is it
[00:50:04]
just for Airtable itself?
[00:50:07]
This is for,
[00:50:10]
I think it’s use is more for portals.
[00:50:14]
Like I don’t,
[00:50:15]
I haven’t been able to enable this in
[00:50:17]
my enterprise,
[00:50:18]
but it’s one of those things where it’s
[00:50:21]
most useful for your portal users.
[00:50:24]
Like if you’re in an enterprise anyway,
[00:50:27]
you’re fine.
[00:50:29]
Miro doesn’t do this.
[00:50:30]
All the other SaaS apps don’t really do
[00:50:32]
this.
[00:50:34]
This is more for the people who don’t
[00:50:36]
need to know that you’re using Airtable in
[00:50:38]
the first place.
[00:50:41]
Yeah.
[00:50:42]
So, yeah.
[00:50:43]
And it’s enterprise only.
[00:50:45]
Yeah.
[00:50:46]
Resize and wrap headers in grid and list.
[00:50:49]
We talked about this.
[00:50:51]
Mm-hmm.
[00:50:52]
Yeah,
[00:50:52]
so you can drag it or you can
[00:50:54]
also kind of double click to the side,
[00:50:57]
not on the name and it will- Like
[00:50:57]
Excel too, kind of like that.
[00:51:01]
Yeah, and then here’s the options.
[00:51:04]
Yeah, so that’s there.
[00:51:09]
So we kind of talked about that,
[00:51:11]
much needed.
[00:51:11]
I know this was like number one on
[00:51:13]
Scott Rose’s like wishlist that he’s
[00:51:16]
maintained for fifteen years.
[00:51:22]
Yeah.
[00:51:22]
Okay.
[00:51:22]
Tab navigation and record detail page.
[00:51:25]
This was a big one.
[00:51:27]
Very useful.
[00:51:29]
Like I said earlier,
[00:51:30]
I often have very long detail pages and
[00:51:33]
being able to jump to them.
[00:51:34]
Very nice.
[00:51:35]
I would love it if they were treated
[00:51:38]
as HTML anchor tags.
[00:51:39]
So you could like send someone a direct
[00:51:41]
link to a specific section, but you know,
[00:51:46]
once you’re there,
[00:51:46]
it’s easy enough to just click on one.
[00:51:52]
I have a few complaints about this,
[00:51:54]
but I’m happy to see it.
[00:51:58]
It’s an improvement, I think.
[00:52:00]
I will take it.
[00:52:02]
But there’s so many things that I’m like,
[00:52:04]
I wish you could
[00:52:06]
like actually turn it into like have have
[00:52:08]
several tabs have several groups assigned
[00:52:11]
to one tab um and then maybe like
[00:52:14]
pageant like actually have them on
[00:52:15]
separate pages just because rather than
[00:52:17]
the scrolling and then yeah i’m like i
[00:52:19]
want to be able to give a sub
[00:52:21]
header like i want a group like label
[00:52:23]
a set of fields inside of a group
[00:52:25]
without it being its own group i don’t
[00:52:27]
know yeah versus i have to make that
[00:52:30]
i’m like i hate this but
[00:52:32]
there it’s a table of contents almost yeah
[00:52:35]
it’s not really tabs yeah yeah that’s how
[00:52:40]
i think of it it’s also a little
[00:52:42]
buggy if you have a really long section
[00:52:44]
you click on in it it doesn’t take
[00:52:46]
you to the right section it’s like if
[00:52:49]
they were angry yeah yeah so yeah i
[00:52:54]
agree there’s room for improvement but
[00:52:56]
it’s kind of standard the other thing
[00:52:59]
you’ll notice is like
[00:53:01]
A lot of times the first section doesn’t
[00:53:04]
have a name or it just has like
[00:53:06]
a generic name and you always gotta rename
[00:53:08]
it and then you wanna show it.
[00:53:11]
So it shows up in the menu.
[00:53:13]
A couple of things there, yeah.
[00:53:15]
So hide empty sections by level.
[00:53:21]
Let’s see, hide empty sections
[00:53:24]
This is if you have a list view.
[00:53:27]
Previously,
[00:53:29]
there was just one setting overall of
[00:53:31]
hiding empty levels if they didn’t have
[00:53:35]
anything linked to it.
[00:53:36]
And they could say, we’ll do that,
[00:53:37]
but only if it’s a project and not
[00:53:39]
a task.
[00:53:41]
Then this is just for the user,
[00:53:44]
it looks like, not at the admin.
[00:53:46]
Can you set this?
[00:53:48]
I think it’s one of the settings that
[00:53:50]
you can set by default and have the
[00:53:52]
end user override on their end.
[00:53:56]
I thought this is new to me because
[00:53:59]
I think I was looking at this yesterday
[00:54:01]
and I didn’t get it per section.
[00:54:04]
I just had the global one.
[00:54:05]
I have to double check if that’s not
[00:54:08]
enabled.
[00:54:09]
So frustrating that you can’t do this.
[00:54:13]
That feature doesn’t work in a synced
[00:54:15]
table.
[00:54:17]
Yeah.
[00:54:18]
Really annoying.
[00:54:19]
Hi.
[00:54:20]
It just says doesn’t work.
[00:54:22]
It says, sorry,
[00:54:22]
this feature does not work.
[00:54:25]
If the link between the tables is synced.
[00:54:27]
Yeah.
[00:54:28]
Yeah.
[00:54:29]
Yeah.
[00:54:31]
Yeah.
[00:54:31]
So I’ve had to do a workaround where
[00:54:33]
you create another link and set that up
[00:54:38]
just in there and then it would work.
[00:54:41]
The old way.
[00:54:41]
Yeah.
[00:54:42]
Yeah.
[00:54:42]
Yeah.
[00:54:45]
Okay, let’s keep moving.
[00:54:46]
We’re coming up to the hour.
[00:54:48]
Generate structured data with AI and
[00:54:50]
automations.
[00:54:52]
I was looking at this one.
[00:54:54]
before it would output like a big old
[00:54:57]
string.
[00:54:58]
And now you can have it output like
[00:55:00]
a JSON object,
[00:55:01]
which is pretty useful if you’re
[00:55:03]
immediately going to pass it to a script.
[00:55:05]
But it’s still useful if you’re using like
[00:55:08]
the update record separate of conditional
[00:55:12]
logic and all that because you could
[00:55:13]
specifically target this field must equal
[00:55:17]
this exactly instead of doing a
[00:55:19]
complicated like does this blob of text
[00:55:22]
contains.
[00:55:26]
Yeah, yeah, that’s cool.
[00:55:27]
That comes in handy.
[00:55:28]
So you can standardize the output.
[00:55:30]
Because yeah, in the past,
[00:55:31]
you’d have to like run it through a
[00:55:32]
script and convert it to JSON and then
[00:55:35]
set it as the output object.
[00:55:38]
I have sometimes when I do that,
[00:55:40]
it will randomly add three back ticks to
[00:55:42]
the front to like turn it into a
[00:55:44]
code block.
[00:55:45]
And I’m like, stop, don’t, don’t do that.
[00:55:47]
And it’s doing it.
[00:55:47]
I’ve had that with AI too,
[00:55:52]
where your prompt is like,
[00:55:54]
this is exactly how I want it.
[00:55:56]
And it still tries to put the mark
[00:55:58]
down.
[00:55:58]
Yeah.
[00:55:58]
Yeah.
[00:56:00]
Frustrating.
[00:56:03]
Okay, push updates to manage bases.
[00:56:06]
So if you use manage bases now through
[00:56:09]
the admin, you can push it.
[00:56:12]
Although it’s not perfect.
[00:56:13]
I use this functionality and a lot of
[00:56:16]
times it just breaks.
[00:56:18]
If you have like linked record or synced
[00:56:21]
tables into the child,
[00:56:23]
it doesn’t know how to do those.
[00:56:25]
And so it just air out and you
[00:56:27]
still have to go into the child and
[00:56:29]
pull the update.
[00:56:31]
So not quite,
[00:56:35]
but it is nice to be able to
[00:56:37]
push from one place.
[00:56:40]
New share dialogue.
[00:56:42]
I think this is just a redesigned.
[00:56:45]
Yeah.
[00:56:46]
Field agent web image search.
[00:56:50]
Haven’t used it, but a cool idea.
[00:56:54]
Yeah,
[00:56:54]
this one seems more useful to me than
[00:56:56]
the one we talked about before.
[00:56:58]
Yeah,
[00:57:00]
so you can basically specify it to search
[00:57:04]
the web and pull in data into your
[00:57:06]
fields.
[00:57:09]
Timeline critical path.
[00:57:12]
This is a visual enhancement to the
[00:57:15]
timeline view.
[00:57:17]
Useful,
[00:57:18]
but not as much of a game changer
[00:57:20]
as some of the other ones.
[00:57:25]
Yeah.
[00:57:25]
Okay.
[00:57:25]
We’re kind of getting to the end.
[00:57:26]
Okay.
[00:57:27]
So this is one that’s been in beta
[00:57:29]
for a while.
[00:57:30]
App sandbox.
[00:57:31]
I know Kamille,
[00:57:32]
you’re a heavy user of this.
[00:57:34]
Yeah, it’s,
[00:57:37]
depending on what you’re building,
[00:57:39]
it’s either going to be flawless and
[00:57:41]
you’re going to wonder why they didn’t
[00:57:42]
start with this.
[00:57:43]
And then also depending on what you’re
[00:57:45]
building, it’s going to be like, wow,
[00:57:47]
why would they do it this way?
[00:57:49]
Why didn’t they just use Git?
[00:57:50]
No one knows.
[00:57:52]
But it’s like,
[00:57:53]
this is one of those things of if
[00:57:54]
you’re in an enterprise, especially,
[00:57:58]
It is so useful,
[00:58:00]
especially when you launch a base and like
[00:58:02]
you hand it off to someone to actually
[00:58:04]
use and then you have to do a
[00:58:05]
big change that would like interrupt their
[00:58:08]
day to day life.
[00:58:11]
Having that as like a draft or like
[00:58:15]
staging area where you can make all of
[00:58:17]
your structural changes and then push it,
[00:58:20]
it just makes things deployment pretty
[00:58:22]
easy.
[00:58:22]
OK, I’m going to pick one more.
[00:58:29]
Due to time.
[00:58:29]
So admin panel sync, this is really cool.
[00:58:33]
So all of your bases, your interfaces,
[00:58:36]
your workspaces,
[00:58:37]
and your user and your user groups,
[00:58:39]
you can sync into an Airtable base and
[00:58:43]
it will pull from the admin panel and
[00:58:46]
show up in your base.
[00:58:47]
So all that information,
[00:58:49]
you can do some cool stuff.
[00:58:50]
We’ve built some cool interfaces with
[00:58:53]
this.
[00:58:55]
I want them to add automations to the
[00:58:57]
metadata.
[00:58:58]
Yes.
[00:58:59]
There’s a couple of things that I wish
[00:59:01]
were more discoverable.
[00:59:03]
This would have been a perfect opportunity
[00:59:04]
to do it.
[00:59:05]
This one is pretty useful.
[00:59:07]
We use it for like,
[00:59:09]
we have to onboard external people
[00:59:11]
sometimes,
[00:59:12]
and it’s a whole list of things that
[00:59:14]
we have to do.
[00:59:15]
And you never know when someone has
[00:59:17]
accepted their invite,
[00:59:19]
but now you can because the admin panel
[00:59:22]
sync, you can just say,
[00:59:23]
when a new interface collaborator appears
[00:59:27]
in this base,
[00:59:28]
like do whatever process you need so it
[00:59:30]
it unlocks a lot of like uh administrative
[00:59:34]
things that are like a pain to manage
[00:59:36]
on your own yeah very cool
[00:59:40]
Cool,
[00:59:40]
let us know what your favorite feature of
[00:59:42]
the last six months was and what you’re
[00:59:44]
relying on.
[00:59:45]
If there’s any that we need to go
[00:59:47]
deeper in.
[00:59:48]
Going forward, this one covered a lot.
[00:59:51]
We’ll dig deeper into the fewer that will
[00:59:53]
get announced in the next couple of weeks
[00:59:55]
on next month’s round the bases.
[00:59:59]
So with that, we’ll be back next week.
[01:00:00]
We’ll do a deep dive,
[01:00:02]
a demo use case that
[01:00:04]
that one of us will put together and
[01:00:07]
showcase that and excited to be back.
[01:00:09]
Hope everybody has a great new year,
[01:00:12]
twenty twenty six,
[01:00:14]
and excited to be back with you on
[01:00:16]
the podcast.
[01:00:17]
Take care.
[01:00:18]
Thank you.