6/1/2021 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S08-E05

Duration: 63 minutes

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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.

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 – 00:01:06 –

Audience Questions – 00:42:25 –

Kamille Parks answers the Airtable question: “What week number of the year does a event take place?”

Answer: The answer wasn't as straight forward as using the date/time difference function, which would only give you the number of weeks in between a date range. We have a start date and an end date. I have two sets of formula fields. The first set shows what the week number of the start date is, and then the week number that the end week is. I also have this formula field which is just a string of numbers 1 to 53, in a comma seperated list.

Field Focus – 00:48:35 –

A deep dive into the Button Field Button – What Buttons do is they allow you to connect to a couple different things. You can give the name of what you want the Button to say. Action is open URL. You can stylize it. Next segment will show how to run a script off of a button. Other actions include preview URL, send email with SendGrid, send SMS with Twilio. 

Learn More Here

Scripting Time – 00:54:35 –

Explore Scripting with “Run Script with Button”.

Scripts interacting with Buttons..

View Script

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:01:06

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

Segment: Audience Questions

Start Time: 00:42:25

Airtable Question – What week number of the year does a event take place?

Kamille Parks answers the Airtable question: “What week number of the year does a event take place?”

Answer: The answer wasn't as straight forward as using the date/time difference function, which would only give you the number of weeks in between a date range. We have a start date and an end date. I have two sets of formula fields. The first set shows what the week number of the start date is, and then the week number that the end week is. I also have this formula field which is just a string of numbers 1 to 53, in a comma seperated list.

Segment: Field Focus

Start Time: 00:48:35

Learn about the Button Field – What Buttons do is they allow you to connect to a couple different things. You can give the name of what you want the Button to say. Action is open URL. You can stylize it. Next segment will show how to run a script off of a button. Other actions include preview URL, send email with SendGrid, send SMS with Twilio.

A deep dive into the Button Field Button – What Buttons do is they allow you to connect to a couple different things. You can give the name of what you want the Button to say. Action is open URL. You can stylize it. Next segment will show how to run a script off of a button. Other actions include preview URL, send email with SendGrid, send SMS with Twilio. 

Learn More Here

Segment: Scripting Time

Start Time: 00:54:35

Scripting Time: Run Script with Button – Scripts interacting with Buttons.

Explore Scripting with “Run Script with Button”.

Scripts interacting with Buttons..

View Script

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:00:02] Welcome everybody to the BuiltOnAir podcast. Good to be back with you after
[00:00:07] a long holiday weekend. We hope you are doing well. I am Dan Fellars with you
[00:00:13] live every week and also have Kamille Parks with us. Hello Kamille.
[00:00:18] Glad to have always good to have Kamille with us,
[00:00:22] so it's just gonna be the two of us today um
[00:00:25] and we're excited to be with you and see what's going on in in their table.
[00:00:29] So just to recap for those that are new, built on your podcast is a live variety
[00:00:35] show every week at 11 a.m. Eastern time we get together and talk about what's
[00:00:42] going on in the world of Airtable and go through different segments and variety
[00:00:47] of different topics that we cover. So it's a lot of fun.
[00:00:51] I hope that everybody can enjoy and enjoy and and join us each week or catch us
[00:00:56] after the fact either on Youtube or on our audio podcast as well,
[00:01:01] listen to us. So check us out subscribe and be a part of the community.
[00:01:06] So with that we always like to start on round the basis, This is where we go
[00:01:12] through the different communities and see what's going on, see what people are
[00:01:16] talking about,
[00:01:17] give you kind of a recap of of everybody's um
[00:01:22] discussions and as always we like to start with the Airtable community,
[00:01:28] see what kind of questions people are asking,
[00:01:31] always click on the latest and see what's new
[00:01:36] um
[00:01:38] looks like under the product suggestion, you always get these again,
[00:01:45] this is one started many years ago, 2016,
[00:01:49] That was before my time, probably before your time probably I think I'm 2018 is
[00:01:56] my yeah,
[00:01:59] that's crazy. So this one this thread has been going for a long time and still
[00:02:04] nothing from Airtable, so somebody just complaining about
[00:02:08] time only field. So you can you can have a date with a time,
[00:02:14] you can also have a duration field but not a time only field.
[00:02:18] So I guess people are looking for a time only field, but you can you can do that
[00:02:22] with a formula, right? You can extract,
[00:02:26] you could uh make the date arbitrary and then use a formula date time format and
[00:02:33] just take the component that's time. Um it'll be read as a string everywhere.
[00:02:39] Uh
[00:02:40] So
[00:02:42] I've seen some people use work arounds with the duration field as well.
[00:02:45] Uh
[00:02:46] So it's, you know,
[00:02:48] it's sort of kind of possible, but not really.
[00:02:53] Yeah.
[00:02:54] Yeah, so that yeah, so it's not ideal but there is work arounds uh looks like
[00:03:02] you responded a couple questions on here. I did. Uh This one I was going to do
[00:03:10] for the audience question but I couldn't quite crack it. So I'm not doing this
[00:03:14] one. But the gist of this was to
[00:03:18] um if a date fell on a friday saturday or sunday, force it to be the following
[00:03:24] monday
[00:03:25] um which you can do using date ad and um you know, switch formula,
[00:03:30] but there was some kind of hang up for the sunday option. I got it to work on my
[00:03:35] end in a test base that I have, but we're still kind of working through uh it's
[00:03:41] not really working on her end.
[00:03:43] Yeah,
[00:03:45] so it might be a time zone issue. I think it is a time zone issue when I turned
[00:03:50] on the use the same time zone for everybody option in the formatting,
[00:03:56] um options for the formula field. It worked for me. Um
[00:04:01] but I don't know.
[00:04:03] Yeah,
[00:04:05] yeah. Time zones are
[00:04:07] a lot of fun working with
[00:04:10] and you are the de facto date guru.
[00:04:15] Not sure how that happened, but here I am.
[00:04:19] That is your calling in life too.
[00:04:23] No all things date and calendars.
[00:04:27] Yeah.
[00:04:28] Alright actually looks like I comment on this one
[00:04:32] if I remember
[00:04:34] so this one's a little bit old but
[00:04:38] I guess I commented a while ago so upload attachments, there are third party
[00:04:43] tools um
[00:04:47] to to do that. Yeah uploading attachments can be tricky are amplified product,
[00:04:51] you can actually upload directly through amplify either U. R.
[00:04:55] L. Um And we also have some products that help with attachments
[00:05:01] for the A. P. I. And for I think all of the A. P. I. Is really,
[00:05:06] I think the issue is Airtable only accepts U. R. L. S. To upload upload from,
[00:05:12] it doesn't accept a raw file pushed straight to Airtable, is that correct
[00:05:17] correct? Yep. Yeah. Yeah so the challenge is always getting into the cloud
[00:05:23] somewhere else
[00:05:25] and then linking to it. Yeah I'm pretty sure that is the reason why page
[00:05:30] designer doesn't have an option to automatically
[00:05:34] dump the generated output as um
[00:05:39] a file in an attachment field for the Associated record. I think there
[00:05:43] running into the same problem as everyone else that they have to upload it
[00:05:47] somewhere first jake could choose to do, they just haven't done it.
[00:05:51] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:05:53] Yeah it's a challenge. We did we did solve it with amplify. Um So I would
[00:05:59] imagine that Airtable could also
[00:06:02] solve it if they chose to.
[00:06:05] You know here's one that this actually made a couple of communities.
[00:06:08] Um It's kind of interesting. Airtable may not like uh this discussion but there
[00:06:14] came out an open source you know and they actually call themselves and their
[00:06:19] table alternative this no CO D. B.
[00:06:23] Um So it's been making the rounds. I saw it on hacker news and uh was on indie
[00:06:30] hackers I think it was on product hunt as well.
[00:06:33] So I'm getting a lot of buzz and I kind of read about what the overall community
[00:06:40] was thinking about it, a lot of interest. I actually played with it.
[00:06:43] I don't know if you did Kamille. Um no, I meant to um
[00:06:49] but yeah, we in, you know the BuiltOnAir slack community, we talk a lot every
[00:06:55] time there's a new competitor to Airtable, we all kind of, you know,
[00:06:59] take a shot at it and look at it. I didn't get a chance to look at this one.
[00:07:03] Normally I'm pretty critical
[00:07:05] of things that have like the exact same user interface and this one does have
[00:07:09] the exact same user interface, but it's open source. So I'm
[00:07:12] I think my official comment was I'm going to choose not to be a hater.
[00:07:17] So
[00:07:20] yeah, so if um, if it loads will give a sneak peek at it. Yeah,
[00:07:26] very similar. It's amazing how many, how many companies used to see them coming
[00:07:32] out and you're like, wow, that looks a lot like Airtable. Not that Airtable
[00:07:36] was the originator of their design,
[00:07:39] copied off somebody else. But
[00:07:42] uh, the color just, I'm looking at the top kind of the top bar,
[00:07:49] the blue is very, very reminiscent of their tables default blew the gallery view.
[00:07:55] It looked, you know, there's only so many different ways you can do a gallery.
[00:07:58] So there's,
[00:08:00] you know, there's some differentiation. I know
[00:08:04] there's a right bar. I think
[00:08:07] there's a view kind of like the Airtable Universe where you can see all the
[00:08:11] tables and all the views on a kind of in the menu on the left hand side of your
[00:08:17] screen and on the right hand side of the screen is some other
[00:08:20] um
[00:08:22] thing and I can't quite recall because I didn't get a chance to play with this
[00:08:25] one yet right here. Yeah,
[00:08:28] this might be it. Yeah.
[00:08:30] Yeah. So um so my first impression is um
[00:08:36] you know, interesting. It's not it's not ready for me to adopt to really use.
[00:08:43] It's it's still very early.
[00:08:45] Um I think their website makes it look better than it actually does when you
[00:08:50] actually get into it.
[00:08:52] Um It definitely does not have the same.
[00:08:57] I don't know something about Airtable like brings joy to use right like that.
[00:09:02] There's like a secret power to the to using it and this one is just kind of
[00:09:09] lacking in that secret power.
[00:09:11] And so, but obviously being open source has some advantages if you're willing to
[00:09:17] host it and manage it. There's some downside to that as well.
[00:09:21] Um,
[00:09:22] but they also, many of their views like their calendar and a lot of there a lot
[00:09:27] of their views that, that they show here are not yet fully implemented.
[00:09:30] So these are kind of like sneak peek shots of maybe what's coming.
[00:09:35] Um, but when you actually install the app, you click on like the gallery view
[00:09:40] and it says like coming soon and
[00:09:43] so, um, not quite ready for prime time but might get there over time.
[00:09:48] We'll see. So definitely one worth keeping an eye on.
[00:09:52] Mm hmm
[00:09:53] and see where it goes. See what kind of adoption it gets. Um,
[00:09:57] There's others out there. There's another open, open source one called base row
[00:10:02] dot io I believe that that I think has a tighter ui um for.
[00:10:09] But the advantage to this one is is how it works is you you store your data in a
[00:10:15] standard database, like my sequel or post grass and then this is just kind of
[00:10:19] the Ui on top of it and so you can keep all your data in kind of a standardized
[00:10:24] database and and they support multiple
[00:10:28] and then it's just kind of that ui layer on top of it.
[00:10:31] Um
[00:10:32] Which is interesting.
[00:10:34] Mhm.
[00:10:35] Well what's going on in Airtable world
[00:10:40] thinking tables. It's like
[00:10:43] there was a kind of that one right there towards the center.
[00:10:46] Sorry, you've exceeded the usage limits. There's kind of an interesting
[00:10:49] discussion um in that thread, a friend of the show coupon um in this thread as
[00:10:55] well, the it was a
[00:10:58] A limit to Airtable that does not come up as often as the number of automation
[00:11:05] do you get per month or the number of rows per base? It was the number of fields
[00:11:10] per table. Airtable has a limit of 500 and
[00:11:14] um this person in question ran into that limit. And so because the other
[00:11:19] limits were so
[00:11:20] much more common, I think there was initial,
[00:11:24] You know misunderstanding of what exactly they had run into.
[00:11:28] And so it was I thought it was kind of funny. They were like yeah we should we
[00:11:32] should weigh more records and they're like oh well I only have 500 records but I
[00:11:36] need like 600 fields.
[00:11:38] And so there is a discussion of, do you really need 600 fields,
[00:11:42] can you do more with that? And then
[00:11:44] Doesn't make sense to have a 500 field limit? So yeah.
[00:11:49] Yeah, I feel like 500's affair limit on fields. Um I think that's that's you
[00:11:57] know manageable and any client projects I've worked on it seems doable.
[00:12:02] Um
[00:12:03] The record limit I think hopefully
[00:12:07] will increase over time. There is some discrepancy on what the actual limit is.
[00:12:12] Kind of interesting people saying they're going higher than the
[00:12:18] you know, limits that they suggest. So yeah, dealing with limits.
[00:12:23] Um
[00:12:25] it's definitely something to keep an eye on
[00:12:28] any other
[00:12:33] hot topics. Seems like most of them are just kinda, it is end of month.
[00:12:38] Um So we're checking out, seeing if they put anything on the what's new,
[00:12:43] I haven't checked yet so
[00:12:48] we'll see.
[00:12:50] Susan Dollar is most very up to date. Um
[00:12:54] So one for May, so Salesforce, I thought I thought this was already there but
[00:13:03] um I think it was um
[00:13:07] it was either in beta or is only for certain plan levels I think,
[00:13:11] and this may be announcing that it's now available for pro and not just
[00:13:16] enterprise or that would be huge. That would be really big news I think I know a
[00:13:22] lot of people use a sales force.
[00:13:28] Let's test it up. Let's try it.
[00:13:31] Yeah,
[00:13:32] it shows that.
[00:13:36] Yeah, it's not showing up there yet
[00:13:41] refresh so you could just came in.
[00:13:50] Yeah,
[00:13:54] let me see if
[00:13:56] it's in the connected accounts,
[00:14:02] Salesforce,
[00:14:05] Hey,
[00:14:06] I want to, I can't remember if that was there before.
[00:14:10] I never check. I I don't, I think I've connected like two or so accounts to my
[00:14:15] Airtable so I'm never in that kind of menu.
[00:14:19] Yeah, I think would be good if, if they do, if they allow it for not just
[00:14:24] enterprise, but for pro uh, subscriptions to. Yeah. Yeah, that would be very big.
[00:14:32] Especially for just getting general adoption people moving. I actually spoke to
[00:14:38] somebody actually you might have as well in the community asking for,
[00:14:43] you know, migrating from Salesforce tear table. So
[00:14:47] that could be a huge um
[00:14:50] market opportunity for our table to take people off a sales force.
[00:14:56] Having been a long time. Salesforce user. I used I was a Salesforce admin for
[00:15:00] several years and so um
[00:15:04] no, that's faced well. And I think a lot of companies would would benefit from
[00:15:09] moving off a sales force
[00:15:11] and they'd save budget wise as well.
[00:15:15] All right, moving on. Let's see what's going on in our world.
[00:15:19] So we had some similar discussion on that Noko DB. We already talked about
[00:15:25] um had some questions about two way syncing. That always seems to come up.
[00:15:31] Um at some point I want to address it with our product, we're close to having,
[00:15:36] we've got one way sync going and two way sync just adds kind of a little bit
[00:15:41] more complexity.
[00:15:42] Um to have true two way,
[00:15:45] especially now with their table have having their syncing. I have heard rumors
[00:15:50] of maybe them um implementing a two way sync, but um
[00:15:57] maybe not. I don't know, I think way back when, when it was announced,
[00:16:03] I think in like the comments of the Airtable community announcement post,
[00:16:08] I think they were saying like, you know, we have high hopes for this feature.
[00:16:13] Some of the things we're looking at include
[00:16:16] two way sync, but it
[00:16:17] obviously there was no like timeline attached to that or you know,
[00:16:22] whether or not it was like actively in development or if it was like,
[00:16:25] well, take a look at it next year. No clue. I imagine they're,
[00:16:29] they've at least considered it. And you know, I don't know what it would take,
[00:16:35] how much it would be to,
[00:16:38] you know, we work whatever internals they have to, to get to a syncing to be
[00:16:43] reliable. So I don't, I don't want it in there if it's, you know,
[00:16:48] buggy is all heck because sometimes Airtable as bugs and I would rather one
[00:16:54] base get messed up than two bases at the same time.
[00:16:58] Yeah, yeah,
[00:16:59] yeah, for sure. And then you can get into the cyclical, uh, continually updating.
[00:17:06] So yeah, it definitely has complexity. I think they prioritize what they just
[00:17:12] launched a month or so ago of having two sources go to one destination.
[00:17:18] Um, so they have that now and they're saying product. Yeah. And that's super
[00:17:24] useful having pulling in multiple basis or from like you could pull in other
[00:17:29] bases and something from your google calendar to fill in one sync table.
[00:17:34] That's you know,
[00:17:36] it's a lot of the way there. Yeah.
[00:17:41] Yeah. Here's a question on red jacks. Um that's a powerful formula and the
[00:17:47] formulas that you can use. I don't know that we ever
[00:17:52] got a solution for this, but they're trying to convert Markdown U.
[00:17:56] R. L. S two. Html. I don't know if you could do that straight with red Jacks.
[00:18:02] You probably need a script. I'm looking at it.
[00:18:06] I think you can
[00:18:08] um
[00:18:10] I am not, I don't know if anyone is an expert in rejects. I answered a few
[00:18:16] questions recently using rejects.
[00:18:18] Um probably because if you extract those now that you have the ability right to
[00:18:24] to answer what God extracted where you want. It rejects replace.
[00:18:28] I think you, I think I think you would do it a combination of like
[00:18:33] the first part, up until the first quotation mark
[00:18:37] would probably be outside of red X. Replace.
[00:18:41] And then
[00:18:42] you would have you would replace the whole string with just the portion that's
[00:18:48] extracted. That's the U. R. L. I would probably have like two different rejects
[00:18:52] replaces in one formula
[00:18:56] and then just the bits on either side if that makes sense. Um Opening and
[00:19:03] closing a tags.
[00:19:07] Yeah maybe this maybe we'll take this up. We should probably find a rejects
[00:19:12] expert to come on and educate. The community coven is pretty good.
[00:19:18] It's good. She's probably as close as we're gonna get to someone who's like an
[00:19:22] expert. Again it's there's so many an Airtable as a particular.
[00:19:27] There's no like one rejects is the thing. Airtable uses a specific
[00:19:33] like library of rejects functions. Um And not all of them, there's like a subset.
[00:19:39] Uh So you know, there's like a cheat cheat. If you go into the formula health
[00:19:44] section, it links to um what all of the different
[00:19:48] characters that you could use our. And I'm there constantly every time I have to
[00:19:52] answer a question because I do not have them memorized. Yeah.
[00:19:56] Yeah. You look them up just enough to solve your current problem and then
[00:20:01] they're gone until next time.
[00:20:04] That's how it is for me. I'm always relearning rejects every time I need to use
[00:20:08] it.
[00:20:10] All right, read it um stuff going on and read it. I thought this one was
[00:20:16] interesting could talk about. So people often ask like can I do this in Air
[00:20:22] Table? Is this a good use case for a table?
[00:20:25] And so let's see if we think this would be a good one.
[00:20:29] So old documents, searchable database metadata is linked to the image.
[00:20:36] Um
[00:20:41] so yeah, I think I think you could do your table with this. They're saying they
[00:20:46] want a good single page view and um you know many extensions has uh
[00:20:54] one of their modules is specifically designed to view one thing at a time.
[00:21:01] So you might be able to
[00:21:03] um
[00:21:04] without building the whole thing out in many extensions, you might be able to
[00:21:07] use that just one little piece of it and have the regular
[00:21:11] um Airtable embed view with like a button that you click in.
[00:21:16] It sends you off to the single page view so you can see things a little bit more
[00:21:20] in more detail.
[00:21:22] Yeah, yeah,
[00:21:24] yeah. I would also plug our amplify, you could also set up and amplify screen
[00:21:29] had the image and then your metadata next to it.
[00:21:34] And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong because amplify is available in the
[00:21:39] marketplace. You can access that if you embed a base somewhere.
[00:21:45] All right. No you can't you can't embed apps um well but you can embed the base
[00:21:54] and I think you can want the apps
[00:21:59] dread.
[00:22:00] Yeah, that and not even if you you know what I just learned is um actually I was
[00:22:08] working with a client, we were trying to do this. You can't even
[00:22:11] take the U. R. L. Of Airtable and put it in an I. Frame.
[00:22:17] Um So Airtable has restrictions so you can't I frame it.
[00:22:22] So even if you have like access to it but you just want to embed it into like
[00:22:26] another, like they use stacker and we wanted to embed directly so that we could
[00:22:31] get the apps, they wanted to see their charts, but they built in their table
[00:22:36] um inside a stacker. And so even though the people like, you know,
[00:22:41] have read only access to Airtable,
[00:22:44] you can't embed it in an I frame, the Airtable doesn't allow it.
[00:22:48] And so you can only use the share links
[00:22:51] um of the base, but those don't include the apps they used to,
[00:22:55] there was a beta, you can do it and then they discontinued the beta
[00:23:01] and for whatever reason, decided not to allow for sharing of apps.
[00:23:07] Uh That
[00:23:09] is upsetting
[00:23:11] the thing I do when I make apps, they're usually
[00:23:17] uh so far there in the form of a more
[00:23:23] uh
[00:23:25] specialist user interface for data entry to replace forms. So
[00:23:32] it's you know, it's such a drawback that you have to already be in the back end
[00:23:37] if you will to use the form. And it's similar to Amplify. Amplify is a great
[00:23:41] alternative to
[00:23:43] regular editing in Airtable because you can specify only edit these fields.
[00:23:49] There's the default feature that you've implemented. So
[00:23:53] you make fields required, where it tells you that hey, you need to fill this in.
[00:23:57] There's so many things about user interface that can be solved with apps and
[00:24:02] it's, you know,
[00:24:03] hopefully that's their, their feature list to add is just the ability to
[00:24:11] more robust sharing options which would include apps.
[00:24:15] Yeah,
[00:24:16] yeah, I would imagine. I'm hoping that they are just rethinking how they do that
[00:24:21] obviously with their pricing model being on a per user basis,
[00:24:26] you know, they're trying to drive people to add users and so if you extend the
[00:24:32] data outside of the log in, you know, infrastructure, it takes away from their
[00:24:38] pricing model. Um I think is, you know, part of the flaw that of that pricing
[00:24:44] model but
[00:24:45] um obviously common in the SAS world so we'll see if they ever address that.
[00:24:51] Hopefully. Um worst case
[00:24:54] you know there are ways where you know a read only user doesn't count against
[00:24:58] your pricing so you can add people as read only so that then they can get access
[00:25:04] to the apps but you can't do any direct live updates of the data like amplify.
[00:25:10] If your read only user you can't fill out the data.
[00:25:13] That's true but read only users when you submit via a form you're a read only
[00:25:19] user there's no
[00:25:21] you know you don't have to be connected to the base at all to be able to submit
[00:25:26] a form. So maybe if they
[00:25:29] you could you could like I frame a form inside of an app or or want to use my
[00:25:36] app as before. Well then you'd have to go through the epa you have to submit it
[00:25:42] via the which is which is doable. But
[00:25:45] um
[00:25:47] Anyways. Yeah, so that's so I think it is doable. I think hopefully that's kind
[00:25:52] of the conclusion they came to.
[00:25:55] What else going on on Reddit
[00:25:59] and send an email by simply clicking a button
[00:26:05] so that that you could do
[00:26:12] so it could run a script or you could have an automation, that's probably how I
[00:26:17] do it right is an automation that's looking for that check box to be clicked.
[00:26:24] Yeah, so that's that's doable
[00:26:26] friend, Aaron doing some reviews
[00:26:31] looking for help.
[00:26:35] So yeah, everybody, you know, small mountaineering business I think I think it
[00:26:39] could work well I think SNPs Airtables a great fit for
[00:26:44] um all the companies that I've talked to, you kind of in that SNB space have
[00:26:49] really liked it. So
[00:26:51] check it out if you have a small business. I think your table is a good fit for
[00:26:54] you.
[00:26:56] All right, moving on to facebook, see what we got going on.
[00:27:02] Um Somebody building out of sight and softer, which is a great third party app
[00:27:08] for for website building.
[00:27:11] Um
[00:27:14] More page designer struggles.
[00:27:21] So best practices our friend ali got in on this conversation.
[00:27:26] Um
[00:27:28] Yeah, so that's always do you have multiple bases and tables or do you just get
[00:27:34] all your tables? Um
[00:27:37] There's always a tradeoff right? There's pros and cons to you know,
[00:27:41] having everything together either in a single base or a single table versus
[00:27:46] spreading them out.
[00:27:48] So it's just kind of there's an art and a science to it. I think of
[00:27:53] finding that right balance
[00:27:55] of knowing when
[00:27:57] uh cl he probably has good insight.
[00:28:01] Mhm.
[00:28:11] Yeah. So just kinda
[00:28:13] if you it's really if you have a one to many relationship which is I think what
[00:28:18] she's getting at um you know if you have one too many then you might want to put
[00:28:23] that many in a another table.
[00:28:26] Especially if it's a
[00:28:28] the many if the many is finite then maybe it can be a drop down
[00:28:33] selection but if the many is kind of infinite and created on the fly then that
[00:28:38] typically requires a
[00:28:40] second table.
[00:28:42] Yeah.
[00:28:43] All right. More people learning. Um There's somebody mentioning our friend open
[00:28:50] source
[00:28:52] so lots of people asking for help chris always sharing his his amazing basis
[00:28:58] that he's built.
[00:29:00] Always good to check out his faces.
[00:29:04] And
[00:29:10] so being able to sort
[00:29:13] or download like specific views things like that.
[00:29:18] Um
[00:29:21] Firebase.
[00:29:24] Yeah. All right. Let's move on.
[00:29:27] Getting short on time here. So look at that, looks like everywhere,
[00:29:32] everywhere. Yeah,
[00:29:34] yeah, sometime this week I'll
[00:29:37] take a look at it. Although these are all from the company itself,
[00:29:41] so yeah, sure, but
[00:29:43] looks like they just posted all their videos this morning,
[00:29:51] frank Gareth,
[00:29:56] mm some spanish.
[00:30:00] There we go, bubble again.
[00:30:03] Right, and Bubba,
[00:30:05] Yeah,
[00:30:07] so here would be a good one. This one's industry specific, so e commerce,
[00:30:11] so using softer
[00:30:12] is specific to e commerce. Um, so that might be good if you're in the e commerce
[00:30:19] space,
[00:30:21] Gareth
[00:30:22] always like his picture of him thinking,
[00:30:26] okay,
[00:30:28] there you go, softer Ceo, she was also on our podcast. You can see that one
[00:30:36] and our friend Ben looks like he had some guests on his show,
[00:30:42] food blogger.
[00:30:44] So meal plan from Ben, check him out.
[00:30:49] Uh more from bed, pens everywhere,
[00:30:52] Aaron
[00:30:55] and Connor as well. So these are getting older. Okay, I was going to add one
[00:31:00] more to our review twitter, twitter seems to be, we haven't we haven't reviewed
[00:31:06] twitter real quick but I just want to see what was going on in the twitterverse.
[00:31:10] Um you always see usually it's pretty positive people are, you know,
[00:31:16] being convinced that Airtable is not scary, they were right,
[00:31:19] so people picking up uh Airtable,
[00:31:24] I thought this one was interesting. Do you think coding will eventually die off
[00:31:28] with platforms like Airtable becoming the norm? What's your thought on?
[00:31:33] I don't I don't think so. I think uh
[00:31:37] Airtable is a good user interface, is how I like to think of it.
[00:31:42] Um and if you're just now getting started with things um and it's the same like
[00:31:48] this is a good picture to stop on all of the other, not quite Airtables,
[00:31:52] they have that they do with their own thing, like Tremolo and a sauna et cetera.
[00:31:55] Um
[00:31:57] They're great for the user interface and putting the button where it probably
[00:32:00] should be, so you know where to click. But underneath it all,
[00:32:03] if you really want to do stuff with your data um if you want something more
[00:32:08] custom to you, there's always going to be a
[00:32:12] um
[00:32:14] you know, a need for coding. Somebody's got to do the coding.
[00:32:17] Airtable isn't made out of legos, it's made out of codes.
[00:32:21] Uh there's there's going to be now, it's really funny to me to think of Air
[00:32:27] Table or something similar built out of leg
[00:32:31] the lingo edition. Airtable yeah, I also think
[00:32:36] Airtable doesn't make coding go away, but it makes it easier to engage with
[00:32:41] code um platforms, so it does simplify coding
[00:32:46] and makes it easier to jump into coding. Um
[00:32:50] So uh so I think it actually enhances coding, makes it more accessible to a
[00:32:56] larger audience. Um You've seen that, you know I think you've talked about how
[00:33:02] much you've increased your coding abilities through their table.
[00:33:05] You
[00:33:06] we see in our community people learning how to code because of the scripting app
[00:33:11] and so
[00:33:12] I think I think it just broadens the coding universe of who can jump into it.
[00:33:19] Sure
[00:33:20] somebody is in their credits so they increased
[00:33:26] Aaron, no coding tools BuiltOnAirtable. So um I see a lot,
[00:33:33] I'm not on twitter that often, I see a lot of people um list what their
[00:33:39] developments Jack is for my product is built out of, you know
[00:33:44] this list of things and Airtable is often
[00:33:47] one of one of many
[00:33:49] uh
[00:33:51] Here's 1 - $2 million dollars BuiltOnAirtable.
[00:33:56] Yeah.
[00:33:57] Trust it.
[00:33:59] So, yeah, exactly what you're saying. Yeah.
[00:34:03] So companies raising, you know, millions of dollars and building their product
[00:34:08] on their table, which is pretty cool.
[00:34:11] Yeah.
[00:34:12] So yeah, and then also, you know, the common ones notion that was that,
[00:34:16] that picture kind of notion versus,
[00:34:20] versus their table. They both have pros and cons. I think they have slightly
[00:34:23] different use cases but definitely overlap.
[00:34:26] Um, so it really depends on your, your use case.
[00:34:31] So I saw her friend Shay, we should get Shay on sometime. She's,
[00:34:36] she's been picking up their table
[00:34:38] and photography, so good to see her on twitter.
[00:34:43] So yeah, lots of uh
[00:34:46] lots of discussion at twitter's,
[00:34:50] everybody's always mentioning Airtable, so
[00:34:53] worth getting. Yeah, I'm not too active on twitter, but probably should be some
[00:35:00] Okay, so with that, I think we're ready to move on
[00:35:05] to our next segment.
[00:35:07] Before we move on to our next segment, I want to do a plug for our primary
[00:35:12] sponsor On2Air on tears. A complete suite of products for Airtable.
[00:35:18] Um if you are running your business on Airtable, you need to check out On2Air
[00:35:23] and the suite of products I'm the founder of On2Air
[00:35:27] and want to give you just kind of a quick snippet of whether it's possible.
[00:35:31] Um in the On2Air suite of apps, we have six different apps that you can use to
[00:35:37] build out your business on top of their table
[00:35:40] and today I want to highlight our backups features. So backups is really good
[00:35:45] for businesses. We have businesses that
[00:35:48] have critical data inside of their Airtable and Airtable does do backups,
[00:35:54] you can see history of um how you are,
[00:36:26] I don't know for the rest of the audience, but Dan froze for me.
[00:36:50] Um
[00:36:52] Ooh.
[00:36:54] Oh no, okay. Well
[00:36:56] what Dan was saying uh
[00:37:00] onto heirs backup option is uh filling in the gaps in between what
[00:37:07] Airtables regular backups can do versus what you can do with On2Air.
[00:37:12] One of the limitations of
[00:37:14] the Airtable snapshots is what they're called um is that they're sort of
[00:37:19] difficult to reinstate. Um what happens when you
[00:37:24] restore from a snapshot as it creates a copy of your base? Um They're done at
[00:37:29] regular intervals but not necessarily a regular milestones. You can force a new
[00:37:34] snapshot but only there's a
[00:37:37] there's a waiting period. You can't force too many snapshots back to that Quebec.
[00:37:42] So if you really want, if you have a defined milestone that you want to back up
[00:37:46] at, you might not be able to do it. Um And that's why onto heirs
[00:37:51] backup option is very, very nice. Is that you can select your backup at any
[00:37:56] point that you would need.
[00:37:58] Um
[00:37:59] I don't know if Dan will be able to get back on. Sure hope you can.
[00:38:04] Um
[00:38:06] let's see
[00:38:08] otherwise. Um
[00:38:11] what we were going to do was do a focus on um one of the fields in Airtable um
[00:38:17] and then go over an audience question and answer it a little bit in detail of
[00:38:23] how you might do it. So I say
[00:38:26] we give Dan about maybe a minute and I'm just going to ramble on about Airtable
[00:38:32] in the meantime. Um
[00:38:35] we kind of already went over what we have seen in the past week or so in the
[00:38:40] various Airtable communities, uh for specific kind of questions and things and
[00:38:45] topics being discussed. One thing that we didn't go over um last week on the
[00:38:49] facebook community, Ben and Ben bringing in chris Dancy sort of regular weekly
[00:38:55] Show. one of the
[00:38:57] questions and comments that we kind of had was over Airtables pricing model.
[00:39:02] Um we talked a little bit earlier this episode about some of the limitations of
[00:39:08] um Airtable charging by user, meaning that they are incentivized as a company
[00:39:13] not to make it uh
[00:39:18] as feasible for external user interfaces to replace so many different users.
[00:39:23] Hi Dan back, my power went out. Oh no
[00:39:29] shit,
[00:39:30] I kind of, I kind of filled in a little bit about On2Air backups um
[00:39:36] but I'm sure you have more detail. I was basically saying like what snapshots,
[00:39:40] they don't let you snapshot every you know, at any given moment,
[00:39:45] you can make a snapshot and then they make you wait, you know,
[00:39:48] a period of time in between when you can make a snapshot. But with um onto your
[00:39:52] backups, that's not the case.
[00:39:54] Yeah, thank you for filling in. Sorry about that. Of course live shows.
[00:39:59] That has to happen. So yeah, so backups um basically the ability to
[00:40:05] always make sure that your data is stored outside of um Airtable which is
[00:40:11] really uh an insurance policy for companies to not be fully dependent on on one
[00:40:18] source and
[00:40:20] and and be able to use that. So just real quickly and then we'll move on.
[00:40:24] But you can set up a project that allows you to add multiple bases to your your
[00:40:30] project in each base is completely configurable. So you can actually define
[00:40:35] which tables you want to back up. So if you don't really care about some tables,
[00:40:40] you can actually get down to the view level
[00:40:42] and even the field level and say I only want these fields to be backed up um and
[00:40:48] you can specify which attachment fields that you want. This will actually back
[00:40:52] up your attachment um files as well
[00:40:56] and um do that. And then part of the power is you can you can back it up either
[00:41:02] as a CSB or a Jason I think in the not too distant future we'll support backing
[00:41:08] up to google sheets as well. And um it's really cool because
[00:41:14] you it will auto add tables. So if you have if you're continually adding tables
[00:41:20] to your base or taking away,
[00:41:22] this will be smart enough to know that it will add any new tables automatically
[00:41:26] to your backups. You don't have to come back to here and reconfigure it with any
[00:41:32] new tables or changes that you make. Um Same with attachment fields.
[00:41:37] If you add a new attachment field it will automatically back that up if it's
[00:41:40] configured, so
[00:41:42] lots of configuration.
[00:41:43] Um we support three different
[00:41:47] sources of where you can back up to. We support dropbox box and google drive
[00:41:53] and then you can specify the schedule on how frequently you want to back it up.
[00:41:58] Either monthly, weekly, daily and some plans offer hourly as well so you can get
[00:42:03] it near real time backups of your data and always have that peace of mind that
[00:42:08] your data is stored outside of Airtable.
[00:42:11] So that is the On2Air backups. Check that out along with our other suite of
[00:42:15] products um for you if you're running your business on their table.
[00:42:20] Cool. Um Why don't we Kamille? Why don't why don't we skip ahead actually?
[00:42:25] If you want to do your audience question
[00:42:29] sure we can come back to it.
[00:42:35] Uh I'm ready. Let me hear my screen and hopefully you guys hold on
[00:42:43] now, hopefully you guys can see it. Um
[00:42:46] So there was a pretty interesting question um that was, I believe not the last
[00:42:53] week, but the week before that um the particular user had a start date and end
[00:42:59] date and they wanted to know not the number of weeks that uh you know,
[00:43:05] was within that time span, but the weak numbers
[00:43:08] Um of the year, so there's 52 weeks in a year. Um and they wanted to know that
[00:43:13] this event took place between week two and week five.
[00:43:18] it was a pretty
[00:43:19] interesting question to me because the answer wasn't as straightforward as,
[00:43:24] you know, using the date time difference function, which would only give you the
[00:43:29] number of weeks um in between a date range. So uh solution was actually a little
[00:43:36] bit simple, it was just kind of
[00:43:38] a little bit hard to visualize that first. So
[00:43:41] um we have a start date and end date. Pretty simple. I have a
[00:43:46] two sets of
[00:43:48] Formula fields. The first set shows what the week number of the start date is
[00:43:54] and then the week number of the end week is. So starting in week 15,
[00:43:59] ending in week 17. I also have this formula field which is just
[00:44:06] A string of numbers one through 53 um
[00:44:11] and a comma separated list so that it's not even really a formula per se,
[00:44:17] but it gives us a standard
[00:44:19] um unedited ble value that I can use in my next formula without me having to
[00:44:24] type or copy and paste this multiple times in the next formula.
[00:44:29] The last formula is where the magic happens, it uses the mid function and a
[00:44:35] couple of fines. So what it's doing is it's finding this week number um when it
[00:44:42] was created somewhere in this list of weeks, one through 53.
[00:44:47] Um and then finding the end
[00:44:50] uh week in that same list and then getting you
[00:44:55] that piece of that comma separated list. Hopefully that makes sense.
[00:45:00] So if you look at it now, you'll see 15 and 17, you'll get 15 comma 16 comma 17
[00:45:06] for this one, which is a much longer time span, you'll see 11 all the way
[00:45:11] through 22.
[00:45:12] Um Some caveats with this particular method is that it only works if um
[00:45:19] the dates are within the same year. Um There probably is um
[00:45:25] a good method, probably not a good method, there's probably a method of doing
[00:45:30] this. Uh If you have a time span that spans across a year or several years,
[00:45:36] but then at that point it's probably not super useful to have a comma separated
[00:45:40] list of the week numbers if it's you know,
[00:45:44] a three year time span. So that's that's not really as much of a concern.
[00:45:49] But for the uh initial sort of ask uh this is one particular method that someone
[00:45:56] might be able to use.
[00:45:58] Yeah, not even weeks if you wanted, you know, random start
[00:46:03] number and an end number and then get everything in between.
[00:46:07] Although you have to create your one through
[00:46:10] 100 or whatever. Yes. Um I think the way I did this is I went into Excel and
[00:46:16] then just type one and then two and then use the fill handle to just drag down
[00:46:21] until I got to 53
[00:46:24] and then
[00:46:26] uh
[00:46:28] Copied and pasted in here. I don't remember how I got the commas in there but
[00:46:32] that's not that was you know that's not the hard part of this.
[00:46:36] You know and you only have to do it once you just have to consider all the
[00:46:40] numbers that you might need. And the reason why there's 53 instead of 52 is that
[00:46:44] you know
[00:46:45] You know a year doesn't end perfectly at the end of the 52nd week.
[00:46:50] So
[00:46:50] right
[00:46:52] there again.
[00:46:53] Although I don't know if we're allowed to say Excel on this show.
[00:46:55] Well you know sometimes it's useful and sometimes I still have it.
[00:47:00] I might have it. No I don't have it open right now. I had it opened yesterday.
[00:47:04] You can do the fill handle thing in Airtable as well. But I think it's a little
[00:47:09] bit more
[00:47:10] I think in Excel it asks less of you if that makes sense of when you want to
[00:47:16] fill in. Like if I think if I put in,
[00:47:18] I don't know if it'll even let me do it with a single line text field.
[00:47:21] If I do one and go down it's going to fill 111 but if I do one too,
[00:47:27] I think then it'll
[00:47:31] let's see if I can click properly.
[00:47:37] No. Uh I think if it were a number field, if you had two numbers defined,
[00:47:43] so it could establish a pattern uh single line text field, I guess it makes
[00:47:47] sense that, you know, it's not a number, it's a it's a string with the value of
[00:47:52] one,
[00:47:54] so and whatever. Uh some things are easier to do in sheets or an excel.
[00:47:59] Um
[00:48:01] Yeah,
[00:48:03] cool, thank you, Kamille. Yeah, very useful. It's it's amazing like those
[00:48:07] formulas, if you really dig deep into them and get familiar uh
[00:48:13] you can do a lot of stuff, let your imagination fly with that.
[00:48:16] So real quick shoutout. Gonna shout out to Garrett Legrand who's watching,
[00:48:21] loves the new format. So thank you Garrett for joining us. We've also got Hannah
[00:48:26] in the chat as well, so
[00:48:28] thank you guys for being with us. Glad you could join us. Okay,
[00:48:33] I'm gonna move on,
[00:48:35] we're gonna talk, we're gonna do a field focus for this next segment and we're
[00:48:40] gonna focus on the button field. So
[00:48:45] if you remember um
[00:48:50] if you lived pre button, which I believe Kamille and I both did and we're in the
[00:48:57] Airtable world. Pre button, you remember creating formula fields um to generate
[00:49:03] these links and then this is this was basically how you would do that.
[00:49:07] So you have these really long, I had a client that had these really long.
[00:49:11] Um You are al's that essentially we're buttons, it was a formula dynamically
[00:49:16] built off of the record data
[00:49:18] and it worked you could click on this, it would open up in a new tab but it sure
[00:49:22] wasn't very pretty. And so when they announced buttons that was a big deal.
[00:49:28] And so what buttons do is they allow you to connect to um a couple of different
[00:49:33] things. So you can you can give the name of what you want the button to say.
[00:49:38] One drawback. I know this is a pet peeve of yours is this is not dynamic.
[00:49:42] So it's the same text for every record. So it kind of looks um
[00:49:48] you can't you can't make it specific to that record which would be a nice
[00:49:52] feature for them to add um The formula. So the action is open,
[00:49:56] you are l that's one of them and then and then here this this can be dynamics.
[00:50:01] That you can insert your field and make it dynamic.
[00:50:04] Um You can also style, is it? So it could be more like a typical button or it
[00:50:08] could just be text and then the color you want.
[00:50:11] So nice stuff there
[00:50:13] and I'm going to come back to the open your al but just wanted to show a couple
[00:50:16] others so you can you can open a record in a page designer. So if you have built
[00:50:21] a page designer, this is a great shortcut to go straight to the record that you
[00:50:26] click the button on.
[00:50:27] Um In the next segment, I'm going to show how to run a script off of a button
[00:50:32] and then um preview your l this will open up an app. Um If you have the preview
[00:50:38] app, it will open up that so you can actually see what is the,
[00:50:42] it'll basically I frame the U. R. L.
[00:50:45] Um You can also send email. So this is this was a question. Um Somebody had,
[00:50:51] you could actually, I forgot that you can set up a button to click and
[00:50:55] automatically send an email. So this uses the send grid app.
[00:51:00] Um Same with text and twilio
[00:51:03] form stack, you can create a document, um pixel images and then also custom apps,
[00:51:09] you can specify which app you want to open up. So so those are some of the
[00:51:13] actions that you can do
[00:51:15] but Kamille, I don't know if you knew this, I just learned this when I was
[00:51:19] setting this up, I just by default um put an empty string in the formula.
[00:51:25] What I realize is the button is now disabled.
[00:51:28] And so I was thinking, what is this smart enough to have some enabled and some
[00:51:34] disabled based off of that formula field.
[00:51:37] Uh This is something that I'm just learning right now. Um So what I'm gonna do
[00:51:43] is I I set up this formula this, so this is A U. R. L. A. Just as a google
[00:51:48] search. Um
[00:51:50] and I set that formula to only show if this active is true, so I'm gonna set up
[00:51:56] the script to point to that formula
[00:52:01] and I want to see if it shows some is active and some is not and yep it does.
[00:52:07] So I didn't realize that. So that's really cool. So you can have at least some
[00:52:11] dynamic aspect to these buttons where some work and some don't
[00:52:16] by just having it return in your formula. And you could do this in the formula
[00:52:21] itself.
[00:52:22] Um I could have done the if statement, if it's active then show that otherwise
[00:52:28] show an empty string.
[00:52:29] So that's really cool. So the ones that are active then have the button that you
[00:52:34] can highlight and select and then the ones that aren't are not uh
[00:52:40] highlighted so
[00:52:41] that can come in handy. I could I could see a use case for that.
[00:52:45] Yeah, there's one use case I have for buttons that does take advantage of the
[00:52:52] whether or not a button is enabled. I do believe it only works with the um open
[00:52:58] U. R. L.
[00:53:00] Um feature. Otherwise, if you use any of the other options. Opening Page
[00:53:04] Designer, Open custom map, et cetera. I think all buttons are activated but um
[00:53:12] you know, it depends on whatever app you're opening to do with that data if you
[00:53:17] will. So it would be nice if you could
[00:53:20] have another formula option in the button options where it says
[00:53:27] is enabled using a simple if statement. Like if the button is active then you
[00:53:33] can press and open it up in. Page Designer Otherwise don't give the option,
[00:53:37] but
[00:53:38] you know, wishful thinking. I have a couple little tweaks, I would make two
[00:53:42] buttons that, you know.
[00:53:45] Yeah, for sure. So, so there's a cool little trick for you. Um
[00:53:51] So
[00:53:54] yeah, so buttons are really, really useful I think, you know,
[00:53:57] the other thing that I want them to do is allow buttons to work inside of custom
[00:54:02] apps. Um that doesn't work, it will load it, it'll just load it in A U.
[00:54:08] R. L. But it'd be nice if from inside a custom app you could click on a button
[00:54:12] that ran a script.
[00:54:14] Yeah,
[00:54:14] I hope that they consider that I know for our amplify, we, you know,
[00:54:19] we show the buttons but you can't really interact with what they do unless it's
[00:54:23] an open U R L. Then it'll open. So
[00:54:26] that's really the only action that you can kind of really support inside a
[00:54:30] custom app.
[00:54:33] Just frustrating. So
[00:54:35] with that I'm going to kind of move on to the next segment, which is a scripting
[00:54:39] time. So now we're going to combine uh scripting apps with the feature of a
[00:54:44] button and how they interact in some of the nuances that that go with with
[00:54:49] buttons,
[00:54:50] and then we'll wrap it up with a plug for um BuiltOnAir. So,
[00:54:56] so now if I'm going to change this and you can see the,
[00:55:00] I had the label is run script and preparation for this, and I'm going to change
[00:55:04] the action to run script, and so you just do that and then you'll select the
[00:55:09] dashboard so your dashboards are in your app here. Um uh,
[00:55:14] and I want to click away, but anyways, this shows you all the different
[00:55:17] dashboards that you have. So I created dashboard called scripts
[00:55:21] that has the script in it I want. So this this has several dashboards and then
[00:55:26] it will find the one app name. And so now this will run a script
[00:55:33] every time I click on it and see now these are all dynamic because you can't
[00:55:38] really add a formula to this, so it runs on all of them.
[00:55:41] So if I click on this run script, it's a very simple script then I'm gonna show
[00:55:46] and it just tells you what table you're on and then just prints out the idea in
[00:55:50] the name of the record that you clicked on. So any time I click on a different
[00:55:55] record, it's going to show me that records name and record ID.
[00:55:59] So
[00:56:00] this is really powerful. I use this quite a bit. If you if you're comfortable
[00:56:04] writing scripts, you've likely set up buttons to trigger a script.
[00:56:09] And great way to just process your record, do all sorts of stuff um with it.
[00:56:15] So now if we look at the code inside of here and bring this up,
[00:56:19] um there's a couple of things that you can do. So the second line is how you
[00:56:26] associate it with a button so that you know which record clicked on that button.
[00:56:32] So they have an input record a sync
[00:56:36] and you have to make sure that you put your weight and they give you,
[00:56:39] they tell you if it's a sync then you know you need to put in a weight on there
[00:56:45] and then this select, it's just just the text that goes over the button that
[00:56:49] would show up here.
[00:56:51] And then the interesting thing that I did here is usually um you're associating
[00:56:57] the table um by name. But what I did here is I use this cursor active table ID.
[00:57:04] So this tells you this is kind of a dynamic way of knowing
[00:57:09] where you are within the within the base. So it knows that the cursor
[00:57:15] meaning which table is selected. So it knows that I'm on the leads table when I
[00:57:20] click this button. So that's what that cursor dot active table ideas.
[00:57:24] And so the benefit of that is I can have one script that now can be run from
[00:57:31] multiple tables.
[00:57:33] So if I go over to the sales rep table
[00:57:37] and set up a button
[00:57:39] and have it point to that same um
[00:57:45] at same
[00:57:47] script
[00:57:51] it will it will be smart enough to know um which table I'm coming from.
[00:57:56] And so the exact same code works on either table that you're that you're running
[00:58:01] this script from. So the same
[00:58:03] um
[00:58:04] the same button or a button in two different tables when I click on it now it
[00:58:10] knows I'm on the sales rep table, so I didn't have to edit my code at all to be
[00:58:15] able to support both tables like that.
[00:58:19] Um
[00:58:21] And then and then it just prints out does a markdown on on the table name and
[00:58:26] then outputs the table records. So
[00:58:29] so that is really cool. You can then you can write one script and then you can
[00:58:34] kind of do some if else as you get more advanced in in what you're doing you
[00:58:38] might say okay if it's coming, if my current active Table I.
[00:58:42] D. Or you can also get the table name,
[00:58:45] that would also work. Um
[00:58:48] Actually you just get the table ID.
[00:58:51] And then from the table you would know the name and you could use that and say
[00:58:55] okay if the name is the leads then I need to do this. You need to know like what
[00:59:00] your records I'd record or your field names are
[00:59:06] if you're doing any kind of updates or any any more processing than the simple
[00:59:10] output like this so
[00:59:12] that cursor and then and then also this and then how this works is it actually
[00:59:17] works in either scenario. So if I want to run it instead of automatically
[00:59:22] running like it does from a button, it gives you the choice
[00:59:26] to pick a record and this record is coming. These are coming from whatever
[00:59:31] active table that you're currently on.
[00:59:34] So right now I'm on the sales table. But if I were to go to the leads and click
[00:59:39] on um and then run this. Now. All of the records that show up here are the leads,
[00:59:45] the company's, so it's dynamic based off of that cursor. So it comes in handy,
[00:59:50] really useful for um
[00:59:53] for otherwise you don't. The concept in programming is dry, don't repeat
[00:59:59] yourself. So if you want code that can run on multiple tables,
[01:00:03] this is a better approach than creating to scripting apps. One for each table
[01:00:08] where the code is essentially replicated for the most part. So
[01:00:13] very useful in your scripting
[01:00:15] uh stuff. Any other insights there Kamille
[01:00:19] um just really quickly when you're running a script from a button,
[01:00:26] um it will fill in the first um input record a sync that it finds in the code.
[01:00:33] So uh the method that you use is actually really, really useful in that regard,
[01:00:37] meaning if you have to collect information on more than one record,
[01:00:42] um only the first record that you're asking about is filled in by the button.
[01:00:47] You can't say you know use this record for like the third time I ask for what
[01:00:52] record it is. So um knowing ahead of time what table to pick from and letting
[01:00:58] that be dynamic is actually pretty pretty useful.
[01:01:01] Yeah,
[01:01:02] there again.
[01:01:03] Thank you. So there's our scripting time segment
[01:01:08] and just before we end I want to give a plug for are BuiltOnAir community.
[01:01:12] Obviously if you're listening to this, you're somewhat familiar with it,
[01:01:16] but if you have not um signed up for our newsletter and our slack community um
[01:01:22] Check us out, BuiltOnAir dot com.
[01:01:24] There's a lot of stuff happening. We do a weekly right up of a lot of the stuff
[01:01:29] that we talk about, what's new in the community.
[01:01:32] Um, our podcast, you can find us there. We also have resources guides for
[01:01:37] different industries, um a script library. You can find scripts,
[01:01:42] like the one that I'll put up there. Um, the one that I just did and you can
[01:01:47] find many more in our scripts library.
[01:01:49] Um, you can also, you know, do comparisons of Airtable versus competitive
[01:01:54] products every month. Well actually today, since it's the start of a new month,
[01:02:00] we look at the universe and we'll give metrics on what's happening in the Air
[01:02:04] Table universe.
[01:02:06] Um, you can also see all the products and service providers in different
[01:02:10] communities,
[01:02:11] all related to our table. So it's a really great hub for everything.
[01:02:15] Airtable related. Check it out. Sign up to our newsletter, join our slack
[01:02:20] community and join us uh and follow us on all the social media platforms and our
[01:02:27] podcasts and Youtube Channel.
[01:02:29] We'd love to have you and participate and get your feedback on on what else we
[01:02:34] can do to improve. So
[01:02:36] thank you for your time. Thank you. Kamille apologies for the uh,
[01:02:40] technical difficulties and thanks Kamille for filling in there.
[01:02:45] And we will see you guys next week.
[01:02:48] Pass.
[01:02:51] Yeah,
[01:02:55] Can't get out. There we go.