7/16/2024 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S19-E03

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In This Episode

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

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

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

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

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

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:01:40 –

Meet the Experts – 00:01:41 –

Meet Heather Brown from Brown Bird Consulting.

I’m a former high school English teacher from Colorado now based in Portland, OR. Since 2021 I’ve had my own business running book publicity campaigns and building bases (so far) for clients in publishing and nonprofit arts administration.

Visit them online

Base Showcase – 00:01:42 –

We dive into a full working base that will Heather Brown will show a base to hold contact data for her networks in the publishing industry—authors, publishers, editors, journalists, and agents—as well as client and project data for publicity campaigns. It also holds services, tasks, and schedules for her freelance book pr business, and she is now developing and customizing the base model for other pr professionals and for small publishers and nonprofits who are looking for a more robust and customizable alternative to Google Sheets and/or standalone project management programs.

A Case for Interface – 00:01:42 –

Explore Interfaces with “Conditional Editing”.

Kamille will showcase how to use Interfaces to allow editing of only certain records based on a status field..

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:01:40

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

Segment: Meet the Experts

Start Time: 00:01:41

Heather Brown –

Meet Heather Brown from Brown Bird Consulting.

I’m a former high school English teacher from Colorado now based in Portland, OR. Since 2021 I’ve had my own business running book publicity campaigns and building bases (so far) for clients in publishing and nonprofit arts administration.

Visit them online

Segment: Base Showcase

Start Time: 00:01:42

Personal Relationship Management

We dive into a full working base that will Heather Brown will show a base to hold contact data for her networks in the publishing industry—authors, publishers, editors, journalists, and agents—as well as client and project data for publicity campaigns. It also holds services, tasks, and schedules for her freelance book pr business, and she is now developing and customizing the base model for other pr professionals and for small publishers and nonprofits who are looking for a more robust and customizable alternative to Google Sheets and/or standalone project management programs.

Segment: A Case for Interface

Start Time: 00:01:42

Conditional Editing

Explore Interfaces with “Conditional Editing”.

Kamille will showcase how to use Interfaces to allow editing of only certain records based on a status field..

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

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

[00:00:26] Join us live each week on our YouTube channel every Tuesday at 11:00 AM Eastern and join our active [email protected]. Before we begin, a word from our sponsor on. On2Air Backups provides automated Airtable backups to your cloud storage for secure and reliable data protection. Prevent data loss and set up a secure Airtable backup system with On2Air Backups at on2air.

[00:00:49] com. As one customer, Sarah, said, Having automated Airtable backups has freed up hours of my time every other week. And the fear of losing anything. Long time customer [00:01:00] David states, On2Wear backups might be the most critical piece of the puzzle to guard against unforeseeable disaster. It's easy to set up, and it just works.

[00:01:08] Join Sarah, David, and hundreds more Airtable users like you to protect your Airtable data with On2Air backups. Sign up today with promo code built on air for a 10 percent discount. Check them out at onto air. com. And now let's check out today's episode and see what we built on air.

[00:01:36] Dan Fellars: Welcome back to the built on air podcast. We are in episode three of season 19. Good to be with everybody. All right. We've already got John joining. Welcome, John. Good to have you with us. We are myself, Dan Fellers. We've got Kamille Parks and Allie Alosa joining. We may, we're hoping to be joined by a guest with us, hopefully [00:02:00] later in the show.

[00:02:01] If not, we'll improvise, but as always, we go through and keep you up to date on everything in the Airtable, no code, low code world. I'll walk you through what we're going to be talking about today. We start with our around the bases and there we are. Heather is joining. Welcome Heather. We'll hear from Heather a little bit in the show.

[00:02:24] ROUND THE BASES - 00:02:31

[00:02:26] So I'm just going through what we're going to be talking about today with our around the bases. We keep you up to date on all things in the air table communities. Then a quick highlight on Entware, our primary sponsor. Then we will learn about Heather and her story and how she came into this world of Airtable.

[00:02:44] And then Heather's going to showcase her base of keeping her life organized. And everything running smoothly. Then a quick shout out to join our community at built on air. And then we will end with Kamille talking [00:03:00] about interfaces and conditional editing. Okay. Around the bases. What's going on first?

[00:03:08] Always, fun to, to wake up and see this, or I guess not wake up. This happened yesterday afternoon. How long was it down? I don't know how long it was. I don't think very long. 

[00:03:20] Kamille Parks: 20 minutes. Less than an hour in total. 

[00:03:25] Dan Fellars: Okay. So yeah, air table dealing with some, some issues. Got the 503 air. So hopefully that didn't ruin too many things.

[00:03:38] We're in, I wonder if like automation still run when this, when it's down like this. No. 

[00:03:44] Alli Alosa: I got like a million because of the weird, things around sinking bases, you know, the little trick to like, just have an automation run on a schedule to just find a record so that it wakes up the base. I have that running in probably [00:04:00] like 20 different bases at least.

[00:04:01] And I got all my automation errors were like, for sinking failed for sinking failed. They're all named for sinking. So it's like, I got like 20 of them all in a row from all the different Places. I've got that set up. 

[00:04:18] Dan Fellars: Well, hopefully it wasn't too damaging. Okay. Other one. Let's talk a little bit about AI. I think this is new.

[00:04:26] They finally made their pricing available for AI. So we're going to go through a little bit. So it looks like per user, 6 a month for 3, 500 credits, and we'll talk in a second about credits, and what that means. So that is, that is on the, If you're not on enterprise enterprise has different pricing, I believe it's more expensive, but it comes with more credits.

[00:04:59] [00:05:00] And I don't know if that's public information, but that's general guidance on that. And I believe you have to pay for everybody that has like editor https: otter. ai Users can use AI. It's kind of an all or nothing. 

[00:05:18] Alli Alosa: I believe so. Yes. But if you're on business or enterprise, you can create a separate workspace and only add the people to that workspace that you want, and then turn it on for just that workspace.

[00:05:31] So you don't necessarily need to pay for everyone in your organization. 

[00:05:36] Dan Fellars: But if you have multiple workspaces, unless you're on enterprise, then you're paying for each user on each workspace. You want it? 

[00:05:45] Alli Alosa: Absolutely. Yep. 

[00:05:47] Dan Fellars: Yeah. So it could get pricey. If you, if you have a multi workspace approach and you want it on both.

[00:05:55] Here's a little bit more detail on their, on their, on [00:06:00] their documentation, walks you through why to use it and then understanding AI credits. So it is very confusing. I don't know if you can exactly, it's, it's, it's so that basically like, I mean, even there, so it's based off of like the number of characters in the prompt and the response.

[00:06:24] So So it looks like that's kind of how they differentiate it. So up to 2, 000 characters between the prompt and the response is one credit. Yeah, I guess what's the difference between these two? They're both up to 2000.

[00:06:46] I don't know. This one 18, 000, the 20, 000 uses a hundred credits. I'm guessing there's like a sliding scale in between there. 

[00:06:59] Kamille Parks: [00:07:00] Yeah. 

[00:07:01] Dan Fellars: Yeah, so.

[00:07:09] So, yeah, so it's, it's tough. You can see how many credits are used in the account page. So I want to kind of keep an eye on that. And I was surprised. I think I learned, if you use the, the formula like help to use AI to generate your formula, I believe that uses up your credits as well, which probably doesn't use a ton of credits and you're not Doing that constantly, but, I would have thought that would be like a built in feature of, of air table.

[00:07:48] Yeah, so Anyways, there's AI. There's also discussion on in the built in air community talking about it. If you want to see pricing I think enterprise pricing is [00:08:00] shared in there. So, and then you can basically, you get your defaults and then if you want to buy additional, you can buy more. So you get, depending on the number of users that you have, and then, and then you can buy more at the account level.

[00:08:19] So yeah, that's how that works. And this was a similar vein coming from X, a little bit of insight. If you want to know how it's built under the hood. Airtable made a testimonial saying that they use Lance DB. I had actually never heard of Lance DB. It looks like it's an open source, database for, for multi modal AI.

[00:08:50] So if you're interested in, in how Airtable is using AI under the hood. It looks like they are using this Lance DB, so [00:09:00] I might play around with that in the future. Cool. And I believe that's all the AI. Any other AI pricing comments? 

[00:09:15] Kamille Parks: Not a clue. Still haven't used it. 

[00:09:18] Dan Fellars: What? 

[00:09:19] Kamille Parks: Yeah, I haven't really either.

[00:09:21] Dan Fellars: That's crazy. 

[00:09:23] Kamille Parks: I gotta go. I don't need your ding. Ai . 

[00:09:27] Dan Fellars: Yeah. They now support multiple sources of ai. So in addition to open ai, they support the one from, is it Amazon? I think the other one. So there's, there's alternatives. All right. Moving on. If you want to learn more about ai, here you go. They are doing a.

[00:09:52] A webinar from, from Airtable, learning about interfaces and how to use Airtable AI for added value. So there you [00:10:00] go. You can reimagine your workflows with AI and Interface Designer. So that's July 25th. You can sign up for that. Okay, here's a new feature that Russell Bishop friend of the show found.

[00:10:18] Apparently you can now. Do 100 percent stacked bar charts in your group. I make them look like this and I assume this is inside of interfaces. Is that correct? 

[00:10:33] Alli Alosa: It is. I'm super excited about this one. I did a segment on the show a couple months ago, I think last season showing how to do this. without this feature, like how to like set up a percentage field and group and stack.

[00:10:51] So it looks exactly like this, but now you don't need to use any fancy tricks. It's just a toggle, which is amazing. [00:11:00] 

[00:11:00] Speaker4: Yeah. 

[00:11:00] Kamille Parks: For a while I, I couldn't wrap my head around how to fake it. This was one of the first kinds of charts that I wanted to make an interface designer and I, I couldn't figure it out and.

[00:11:13] This is very useful, just to have it at us. 

[00:11:18] Dan Fellars: I'm trying to figure out, is the 0 to the 50, that is a value, right? It kind of looks like it's empty and then starts here, but this is just the initial value. 

[00:11:31] Alli Alosa: I would guess that either the field he's grouping by has a color that is Gray or it's empty. It's hard to tell because the color that air table uses for empty is the same as one of the light grays that you can choose single.

[00:11:50] So, yeah, it's either either 1 of those things, but I would guess it's the value. 

[00:11:54] Dan Fellars: Yeah. When I saw this, I was like, it's starting at a hundred percent going down. That doesn't make sense. How [00:12:00] could you, but yeah, that must be the initial value for that series. Yeah. 

[00:12:08] Alli Alosa: And maybe 

[00:12:08] Dan Fellars: that was intentional. Maybe you wanted some kind of look like this.

[00:12:12] So you make that first series, that color. 

[00:12:16] Alli Alosa: Exactly. I've got one up on my screen right now. And one of my values is for status, it's called canceled and it's light gray and it looks very similar to what he's. 

[00:12:30] Dan Fellars: That's a nice little color hack. Okay. Here's another feature. I believe I can't remember if we talked about it.

[00:12:39] I know we had another call offline that we talked about this. So if we've already talked about this, it's worth re mentioning coming soon in a couple of weeks, hopefully August. Full two way sync edibility. Which also includes linked records, I believe. So that is cool. I [00:13:00] know Kamille, you had some questions on this.

[00:13:02] Kamille Parks: I do. What does that mean? Yeah, because the, the two fields that they mentioned adding as editable in two way syncs are linked records and user fields. Here's fields are pretty straightforward. In my opinion, I don't really have too many questions about how that's going to be implemented. But with linked records my question was.

[00:13:21] Does that mean that you have to have the opposing table also synced in, or are the linked records virtualized in some way where once you click into The fields to edit what link you're, what records are linked. Is it going to show you a window that's querying the original table so you don't have to sync in both?

[00:13:44] I, I don't know how it's going to be implemented so that you could actually edit those linked records. Or is it just you can remove things that are already linked? Which is my least favorite possible implementation because it's the [00:14:00] most restricted, but I'm curious to see how that would be implemented.

[00:14:04] But once it's in there, I think it's probably going to be fairly useful because. Having linked records come in as just text is, you know, not ideal, especially if you don't have unique names for your records, because then if you want to re link fields together, you don't necessarily have a unique ID to make that linkage again downstream.

[00:14:31] Alli Alosa: Exactly. Yeah, I'm really intrigued to see how they implement this. All the same questions as you, Kamille. I don't know what they consider editing a linked record. Like, do they mean exactly what you said, linking and unlinking things or like actually clicking into that record to edit what it's linked to?

[00:14:51] Yeah, 

[00:14:53] Kamille Parks: I didn't know why it didn't even occur to me that you can click on a linked record to see information about it. So, [00:15:00] like, Do we get that as well? How much information is being carried over into the downstream base? If you require both the tables be synced down, then it's relatively easy, right, to have all the functionality you expect, but you do have those two tables.

[00:15:16] Is that so much of a big deal? Depends on how many records that you have in your base and all of these different considerations. So 

[00:15:24] Dan Fellars: That's my guess is it only works if you sync both tables, but then that, what if that table, my guess is I bet if you don't have both tables linked, then it's just, it's not editable.

[00:15:39] But if you do, then it is. And 

[00:15:42] Alli Alosa: I wonder like how they, how they link them. 

[00:15:45] Kamille Parks: Yeah. Well, to your point, Alia, how do you preserve that linkage downstream? Because there is a record ID, but we don't see the record ID in the interface. So under the hood, what's happening when you sync in [00:16:00] both tables once this features?

[00:16:03] Yeah. 

[00:16:04] Alli Alosa: Yeah. I mean, my hope is that it's smart enough to know if you add two tables to the same synced base, it could be like, Hey, these were linked together in the original source. Want to retain that? It'd be like, yeah. And then it handles the rest of it for you. That would be incredible. Because I'm so annoying having to do all these automations and keep things together to keep.

[00:16:28] Cause that's what I do is instead of linking, instead of syncing the linked. Record field. I think over the record ID of the linked records that it's linked to, and then have all these fancy things that keep them together and it's very complex and it can break and definitely looking forward to this, I'm interested to see how they go about it.

[00:16:47] Dan Fellars: Yeah. So if you if you've already been using a sink and you have this like all editable fields, you, you probably, you should have gotten an email kind of explaining [00:17:00] that That this is happening. So if it's not the desired but it will automatically make all of fields editable, even the ones that currently aren't.

[00:17:11] And if you have early beta access to this, let us know how it works. We'd love to hear 

[00:17:17] Alli Alosa: very interested. 

[00:17:19] Dan Fellars: We'll find out. We'll definitely cover this in August. Okay. Here's some kind of bigger, no code news. If you are familiar with other communities, this is a pretty big community that covers not just Airtable, but a lot of other products out there.

[00:17:39] I've had good conversations with. The founder, Phil, of this organization. And so congrats to Phil and team. They are now part of Zapier. So they're now in the Zapier family. And so yeah, congrats to them. 

[00:17:58] Alli Alosa: Yay. Exciting stuff. [00:18:00] 

[00:18:00] Dan Fellars: Oops. Okay. Here's a fun one from X. I spent an hour troubleshooting an Airtable API call only to learn I typo, I miss typo the table name.

[00:18:13] Happy Sunday. Never done that before. 

[00:18:17] Kamille Parks: I've done something similar in that, try to use IDs wherever I can. And there's been more than one time where I've copied the table ID, but like, didn't select the first key. So it was just BL and then the, the, I think 14 other characters and was baffled because that's, there's no way I memorized what the table IDs are.

[00:18:42] And so I had to. Clear everything out and start over. And then it's just, I don't know how to type. 

[00:18:51] Dan Fellars: Yeah, those are fun. We feel your pain, Kelly. 

[00:18:55] Alli Alosa: Oh yeah. It's either that or an errant comma or semi colon. You're like, [00:19:00] 

[00:19:00] Dan Fellars: yeah, 

[00:19:01] Alli Alosa: it's always something small, extra space. 

[00:19:06] Dan Fellars: Here's another one. Coders struggling with with API calls.

[00:19:12] So this one, it looks like they're building a wrapper around the air table API. And in their wrapper, they had a default, they had a different value for the like default number of records. And so it was messing things up and so yeah, you have one instead to get air tables default.

[00:19:36] So gotta be careful. It's always those little things that are the hardest troubleshoot. Okay. Here's another one. One of my colleagues said air table was a poor man's SQL. I don't know about that. It's different than SQL. 

[00:19:54] Kamille Parks: It's pretty different. Yeah. 

[00:19:56] Dan Fellars: Yeah. [00:20:00] It's probably easier than SQL at some level. The, their query.

[00:20:05] Well, I don't know some ways it's more difficult.

[00:20:12] Okay. From the Facebook community. This is a fun one. Curious. What do you write in a formula field when you know it needs to be added to your table immediately? But you don't know what the actual formula is, or you're waiting to create other fields first to incorporate what's your default value, like placeholder.

[00:20:30] There's some interesting suggestions here. For Frodo, put a number in there. There's one, don't forget to write the formula when you are ready. Okay. Blank quotes. That's, that's what I do. 

[00:20:46] Alli Alosa: I like the guy that says he just writes Bob. 

[00:20:49] Dan Fellars: Yep.

[00:20:53] Here's somebody very, very, specific test formula. Here [00:21:00] you go. Any others? 

[00:21:02] Kamille Parks: I happen to agree with the other person who's named KP by coincidence just a single line text field. I don't, I don't make it a formula yet until I'm ready.

[00:21:16] Dan Fellars: That's true. Yeah, sometimes I'll put, I'll do formula just with the blank placeholder. All right, here's a question. Easiest, cheapest solution to update an Airtable field by replying to an email. So you have an automation that sends an email. And you want to get feedback from that email back into Airtable and Brandy, 

[00:21:40] Alli Alosa: I'd say, 

[00:21:40] Dan Fellars: yeah, 

[00:21:43] Alli Alosa: I agree with Brandy.

[00:21:44] I think that's safest because you can't rely on people to type the same thing every time. And if you're looking for specific words, approve slash, not approve. Either they're going to not capitalize it or do capitalize it [00:22:00] all, or there's always going to be something weird and parsing emails is not easy.

[00:22:05] Kamille Parks: Yeah. Even just doing approve versus not approve. If you get the order wrong, then your automation is never going to work. Cause if you just say, If includes the word approve, then do this, well then, not approve includes the word approve, so you would have to do it the other way around, you'd have to first search for not approve, and then to Ali's point, what if they spelled it wrong, then what do you do?

[00:22:29] Yeah, yeah. 

[00:22:30] Alli Alosa: Or they put in the reason. They say, I'm approving this because it's blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, okay, 

[00:22:36] Kamille Parks: well, Even just approving that doesn't meet either of those conditions. So 

[00:22:44] Alli Alosa: to get the sentiment of the email, I guess. 

[00:22:49] Dan Fellars: Or we can use a webhook 

[00:22:51] Alli Alosa: or 

[00:22:52] Dan Fellars: buttons are the best way. There are tools.

[00:22:54] I know Zapier has a built in Email parser, I assume make does as well. So [00:23:00] you could do it with one of those tools, but it does get complex. 

[00:23:05] Alli Alosa: Yep.

[00:23:08] And human error is real. You can tell them only write approve or not approve and there's no way it's ever going to work. Or 

[00:23:15] Dan Fellars: it's like, please write like above this line and they'll put it like in line down below that makes it impossible to parse. 

[00:23:21] Speaker4: Exactly. 

[00:23:24] Dan Fellars: Human error. Okay. Here's a cool one. Shout out to Kate Potter.

[00:23:31] She showcases her website where wedding photography, where she's using the new embed of, of interfaces. So there's, here's a real world example of. Embedded interfaces. And it's pretty cool. It's almost like a landing page you can embed and it's live. So all this information is going to get live updated with the data from air table.

[00:23:57] So that's pretty cool. It's almost like a, [00:24:00] a real life dashboard. 

[00:24:02] Alli Alosa: It 

[00:24:03] Kamille Parks: looks 

[00:24:03] Alli Alosa: really good. Yeah. 

[00:24:05] Dan Fellars: Yeah. 

[00:24:07] Alli Alosa: Very, very nice. I love all the, the numbers elements that they've got with the descriptions and it looks, it looks really, really nice. 

[00:24:18] Kamille Parks: Compliments to the chef. 

[00:24:19] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is cool. And it's like, I don't even know, you know, just gives ideas of like, Oh, we could use this, make it look like this.

[00:24:30] Kamille Parks: Absolutely. 

[00:24:33] Dan Fellars: Cool. Use case there. Okay. Here's another tool. I always like checking out tools that touch air table. Here's one, two from Martin it's called power save. So if you, if you like, I know I use the, the built in air table does have a, a, a Chrome extension that allows you to update or create new records.

[00:24:58] This looks like kind of [00:25:00] that, but maybe with more functionality and on their pro plan that does cost money. You can actually save to existing records. So that's kind of cool. So there's a cool little tool you can try out and they do have a free version as well, and you can save screenshots. So that's cool.

[00:25:22] Good stuff. 

[00:25:23] Heather Brown: Yeah, I like that. 

[00:25:24] Dan Fellars: Yeah, let me check it out. So that concludes Around the Bases. You are now up to date on everything up to Airtable related. Move on. 

[00:25:34] ON2AIR BACKUPS HIGHLIGHT - 00:25:35

[00:25:36] If you are running your business on Airtable, best practice is to make sure your data is backed up outside of Airtable. That's where OntoAir comes in.

[00:25:44] It will store all your data, all your attachments, and your schema information about your base into Box, Dropbox, or Google Drive. And help you to make sure you have peace of mind, knowing your data secure and [00:26:00] coming soon. We'll have the ability to restore it back into air table with some cool features that no other competitor has.

[00:26:07] So cool stuff coming soon. In a few weeks 

[00:26:11] MEET THE EXPERTS - HEATHER BROWN - BROWN BIRD CONSULTING - 00:26:14

[00:26:14] with that, Heather, welcome to the show. We're glad to have you. And Ali, do you want to ask questions of Heather? 

[00:26:24] Alli Alosa: Yeah, absolutely. Wonderful. Welcome. So nice to meet you. 

[00:26:30] Heather Brown: Thank you. So nice to be on. Thanks for having me. 

[00:26:34] Alli Alosa: Of course. Absolutely. We're very excited. So you are the founder of Brown Bird Consulting.

[00:26:44] I guess we always usually start with just asking how did you discover the Airtable community and what brought you into the world of no code? 

[00:26:54] Heather Brown: Yeah. So, well, first of all, I'm so appreciative of this community. I [00:27:00] just like, I'm so thankful for what you all are doing. And I discovered Airtable, I think in 2018, I had been working as a, I built in, been building up my freelance book publicity business.

[00:27:12] And so I come like not from tech from the humanities, like as no code as you can get. But I was working in book PR. I'd sort of built up a business as a as a freelance publicist for authors and smaller presses. And I was also simultaneously working as operations manager for a tutoring company. So I sort of had my book PR side hustle and I had this day job and I had discovered Airtable and then I had the opportunity at the tutoring company to sort of migrate all of our operations and onto something we like we had not that long ago been in like paper files and there was a lot there were a lot of google sheets and I was just like we need something better and [00:28:00] so Airtable really woke me up to the idea of relational databases and being able to house a bunch of data and and scale it up and also like integrate Workflows and automations.

[00:28:13] And it just like, I don't know, it changed my life and also everything I was like kind of learning and applying in my day job. I was also applying to my side hustle, which eventually became my main hustle in 2021. So now I'm full time for myself doing, doing book PR and I house all my, all my contacts and all my client campaigns in air table.

[00:28:37] But I've also just recently started, Also building them for clients and using the templates that I've developed to, help small presses and, and, Like mostly literary organizations, nonprofits, people in sort of like literary and art [00:29:00] spaces. But really any small business, as you all know, it's applicable to anything, but this is just sort of like where I've come up and, and what I know, and I can see a real need for people to all get out of Google sheets.

[00:29:12] I mean, there are some pretty sophisticated operations that are still just like not using great tools and stuff. So I just have become a real crusader for Airtable. And I came across Ben Green's videos and booked a little chat with him. And he was super generous and just like showed me what he's working on doing.

[00:29:31] And so like, at this point I'm keeping it super simple. I don't know code. I don't even like know a lot of fancy automations. I don't have a databases background. But I want to learn. And I'm also just like interested in keeping it accessible for my clients and like building them things that are very efficient, but also simple enough that they can operate themselves.

[00:29:54] So I don't know, I'm, I'm really excited and nervous [00:30:00] cause I, I still, there's still so much I don't know, but. 

[00:30:04] Alli Alosa: That's, that's wonderful and extremely relatable as well. I, I had almost the same kind of story finding Airtable and doing it for a different kind of purpose and then it changed my life as well.

[00:30:18] I think, I think a lot of people can relate to that. Yeah, absolutely. Did you have like an aha moment when you like, was there a particular project that you were working on? You were like, Oh, like I really. Love doing this. 

[00:30:35] Heather Brown: I think it came on gradually, but the idea of like just the whole idea of relationships and it just sort of like went from 2d to 3d for me.

[00:30:45] That's kind of the way I think about it is like spreadsheets are this flat thing. Databases are these relationships where they just like open into one another. That was a moment where I was like, Oh my gosh, this is incredible. And [00:31:00] another time when we were trying to make kind of a third place, right.

[00:31:06] I don't know. I keep, I keep a basic list of people, basic list of places, relate them to each other. But then you have, then you have clients and you have projects and you have just like all the things you want to do with those, like. Sort of in a third space. And so when I learned about that, it was really revolutionary.

[00:31:25] Formulating my primary fields was like, yeah, so that was, that was a big one. 

[00:31:31] Alli Alosa: Absolutely. Yeah. Those junction tables and yeah. That's the term. Absolutely. Yeah. Those are, tough to wrap your head around. I feel like that is quite a, that's a great question. I think it's a nice turning point for most people as they're learning once they kind of like figure that out and they're like, Oh, okay, like, that's the true difference between storing everything in a spreadsheet versus like you [00:32:00] said, the 3d environment.

[00:32:01] I love that analogy. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, 

[00:32:06] Heather Brown: and so I work with, with publicists and publishers who are, are. You know, they have books coming out seasonally, right? But they're often, they're talking to the same sets of media, same sets of people. Like, so it's PR basically. And I noticed that they were copying and pasting sheets of contacts into separate, you know, sheets and folders for every project.

[00:32:32] And it was like, why are you doing this? Because a, your data is a million places and it's not getting updated everywhere. And be like, you don't see historically over time, like, Oh, this journalist has been really friendly to our work or they like these particular titles or whatever. So just like. The way that it can hold historical data and the way that it, you know, you can see sort of, it, it builds itself over time as you add more information to it.

[00:32:58] And I'm just [00:33:00] stunned by how it like, well, I guess a lot of databases do this, but like, as you add to it, it, it does more work for you. And you can house your work in it. You can create your calendars and your tasks lists. And, so you're actually like use it, collecting the data and working with it at the same time.

[00:33:24] I also love that it's like so customizable and that, you know, so many out of the box industry database programs are, they come pre packaged with all their functionality. And I just think that like the smaller the organization, the more unique it is and the more unique its needs. And so like helping people understand that they can have exactly what they want, instead of having to fit into the mold of some expensive program that they buy.

[00:33:52] Okay. And they're just like forming their organization to work around it. Rather than, I mean, and I, I know there's [00:34:00] probably a whole conversation about like customization versus like standardization and all of that. And it does take more attention. to make a customized thing, but I feel like air table is in this really good spot where it gives you a lot of tools and it does a lot for you, but also allows you to customize.

[00:34:20] So I don't know. I'm, I'm hopeful. I see a need in the publishing industry and I'm hoping to kind of come alongside people and be that resource for them. 

[00:34:29] Alli Alosa: Absolutely. And that was actually, I'm glad you brought that up because that was going to be my next question was like in the publishing literary world, is there, Is there like a suite or like a program that people are usually using for stuff like this?

[00:34:42] Or is it a lot like mostly run with Google sheets and spreadsheets? 

[00:34:46] Heather Brown: It's so much Google sheets. And so even at the higher levels, like I collaborate with big five teams and they're still, or they have their old, their in house. But it doesn't their in house database or whatever that's written for [00:35:00] them, but it doesn't talk to anybody else.

[00:35:01] And so it's hard to share like for interfaces or, you know, view only read, read only views. I've, I've found really useful in like sharing pitch lists with clients and letting them know kind of, here's where we're at. Here's who we pitched. Here's what we're still looking for. Here's what we received. There just isn't a lot of like visibility across teams or across like.

[00:35:26] just like stakeholders, I guess. And so, and the world is becoming so much more diversified. Like I work independently. Authors often hire me. And so then I'm tasked with collaborating with the publisher. They have their own set of tools. So I've tried to become like sort of a centralized hub. Like I'll pull everybody's lists together and put them in this place where we can all see them and work with them.

[00:35:51] But yeah, it's amazing how much is still in spreadsheets. Tools are not aligned [00:36:00] and people are just struggling along, without, without anything like, sorry, it's still early here in Portland, Oregon. 

[00:36:15] Alli Alosa: Oh, great. I was about to ask. So you're on the West coast with Kamille as well. Oh, hi. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:36:22] Excellent. Yeah. Welcome. And we're really happy and happy you're here and excited to see what you've got built. 

[00:36:29] Heather Brown: Thanks. All right. So 

[00:36:32] Dan Fellars: share your screen and we'll get it up there. 

[00:36:36] BASE SHOWCASE - HEATHER BROWN - PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT - BOOK PUBLISHING - 00:36:39

[00:36:40] So you're going to walk us through the space that you've got to keep everything in line. 

[00:36:45] Heather Brown: Yeah, I have I'll just, yeah, I have so far to go, but And I've populated it with a bunch of, this is a copy of my actual base and I [00:37:00] populated it with a bunch of fake, fake data. 

[00:37:03] Speaker4: Perfect. 

[00:37:04] Heather Brown: So, our main two tabs are people and places. They relate to one another through linked fields. I guess I have different views set up for like leads coming in from my website. And then filtered by their role.

[00:37:29] So my freelance reviewers, my booksellers, those that I'm pitching multiple projects to, my publicist network, some of this is like a little, it's a little spotty because I imported a bunch of and copied over a bunch of fake data, but basically I have, you know, my person, my people. Information in the people table, my places in the places table, and they're linked by the [00:38:00] linked contacts field and in people it's called affiliations.

[00:38:03] And so I can see, you know, who is on staff at a place which journalists write for them. If I look for, let's say the New York times,

[00:38:25] Here they are. So, you know, we can add people who. work and we can link and unlink them. Because people move around so much in the media world. And so like being able to really mix and match people with the outlets and they, they write for multiple places. So being able to do that is really crucial.

[00:38:46] And then a few of those junction tables that turns into like in clients I can, I can work for either a person or a place. So I contract with places sometimes to do, you know, kind Build bases for them or do a season of [00:39:00] titles. Publicity for them. Or I can work with people individually. So my clients are either people or places.

[00:39:09] They get con consolidated here in this primary field. So I have a table just of clients that shows their projects, collects the pitches that we do pulls in a bunch of data from, you know, the people or the places field from who they are, includes the services over here. I have a services table that has like, different.

[00:39:32] Services I offer, descriptions for each of them so that I can add them to a client project or to a client proposal. We have status fields that are pulled in from the project. So bringing in a lot of information into a central place from lots of other places in this client's table. Same with projects.

[00:39:51] Projects are like the actual title of the book. These are all titles of movies because I couldn't find like, a mass generator of data that was book titles. So [00:40:00] these are movie titles. So we're. Turn books into movies all the time. Exactly. That's what I was thinking. These are all the, anyway, the books that the movies are made from.

[00:40:12] So I've done some fields here that count up from my lists, the number of media pitches, how much we've pitched, what we've received event pitches, what we've booked so that I can show, kind of like eventually build dashboards. I haven't really done much of this. Building of like, dashboards and interfaces that show like, high level data for campaigns.

[00:40:40] But I like having it there. I feel like I'm building in a lot of stuff that I will have when I want it to do more with. So that's been fun to kind of be able to see my numbers comps titles is where we research sort of [00:41:00] like comparable titles to a project. So it's the, if you liked this, then try. So finding lists of five or 10 books that a book is like, and it helps us talk about them.

[00:41:13] It helps us relate, you know, the, the new book that we're promoting to books that people already know and enjoy. So this is a fairly new table that we're just I'm having an intern kind of build this out a little bit. And so this is kind of a fun experiment. Templates is where I keep all my pitches.

[00:41:36] So my language, I have the type of pitch, initial media, event media. I have the project that it's for. I have a subject line. I have a message, you know, rich text enabled field that, You know, has my links, has my language. This is for a real project, but these are the blurbs below. Basically, this is email [00:42:00] text that I then, like, for now, I copy and paste it into an email or I use I use a tool called MuckRock, which is a standard tool that a lot of, you know, Publicity departments use and people use.

[00:42:12] It's expensive, but it's a journalist database, basically, and it also allows for kind of sending emails at volume, but also personalizing them. So you can build really customized lists in there. I find it a companion. I find a lot of things are like a companion to Airtable, but Airtable is sort of like my central staging area for everything.

[00:42:31] I don't know if you all find this that like, it's it's sort of the hub, right? It's like the place that everything comes into and flows out of. So this is my templates table, where I just keep language and am able to like reference it and And build new pitches from kind of the, the templates of the old ones.

[00:42:55] And then my lists is where I keep lists of [00:43:00] outreach. So every record in this table is a pitch for a particular project. I keep views for the titles. I keep a working view and a shared view. Working is where I work. Shared is what I share with the client. So that they can kind of see the, the process.

[00:43:18] But basically I have status tags that show, we start with like all the places we're targeting that we want to reach out to and what we're asking for from them. So if it's a review or a reading or if we're submitting for an award, and when I pitched them, I moved them to pitch. When we've got interest, when we've got confirmation and then when we actually receive.

[00:43:43] Media, then I can keep lists of the links, the press links, any attachments, if we make a PDF, I can pull quotes that I have. And then I'm, I'm just starting to build into interfaces, kind of like [00:44:00] pictures of each pitch or overall pictures of a campaign. So that's kind of where I'm at. Calendars where I keep basically everything with a date.

[00:44:12] So. I keep a client calendar. I keep all my invoicing in here. So views for month and year, amounts and things like that, that you know, I can, so I can track and I also track it in an accounting software, but I just, again, find like, this is a good central place for me to be able to see like how much I have on the books and what kinds of projects and how it's spread out over the years.

[00:44:39] So that's really helpful. And then in my log table, I keep log notes either by pitches. So I noticed that a lot of people like automate emails coming in. So like you keep track and I'm still very much in like a manual place where if I have a pitch, so that's in [00:45:00] list. And something happens, I will like just make a log record and put in a little comment.

[00:45:08] And then I have a manual record of kind of what's going on with every pitch. I can do that for, projects as well. So I have a section for pitch logs. Where I can track what's going on with every single pitch and that's collected under client or under project. And then I have project logs where I kind of keep higher level like proposal notes, meeting notes, dated.

[00:45:35] I can track how many hours we spend if I want to and then just here's where I keep my meeting notes. So, That's kind of it. And I'm not like, I'm just starting to figure out interfaces and figure out how to help clients work with those. And, and I think it's helpful with like a team to give people interfaces, obviously to like, Pair down what they're looking at [00:46:00] and help them work with just what they need to, instead of being overwhelmed by the whole database.

[00:46:04] Cause I think I come on too strong sometimes. I'm like, look at all of this that we can do. And they're like, wow, I can't make head or tail of that. So it's yeah, it's a process. And, I don't know, I'm, I'm starting pretty low level. I want to keep it simple. I want to keep it accessible, but I think like that's where my clients are at too.

[00:46:26] So we're journeying together. 

[00:46:31] Dan Fellars: And so you're planning to make this available like as a template that you can offer to, to other potential publishing companies or, or just in consulting with you? 

[00:46:41] Heather Brown: I think just in consulting with me, you know, I'll set them up with a template that's like mine and help them migrate their data into it.

[00:46:49] So far, that's what's happening. But I'm, I'm so new to it. So I'm looking for like ways to generate [00:47:00] sort of content that will help them get a baseline level of knowledge, right? Like what a lot of people are doing. Just get people familiar with how it could work for them. Give them a few tools and then bring them to kind of working with me.

[00:47:14] I'll set them up with. With sort of an initial template and we're customizing from there I'm working with a few clients in that way already and figuring it out as we go, but it's working well for them so far I think because I can see like not just the publicity part But I can see like here's where you can house all of your project data And you can also like track your production calendar.

[00:47:33] So I you know small presses are so Overwhelmed. And the reason that a lot of people hire me to do publicity is that their press doesn't have the bandwidth to do the promotion because they're so focused on acquisition and editorial and like just making the books themselves. So if they have a better way to, like, keep track of.

[00:47:51] and the production process then it's easier to have a sense of like when we're going to be ready to promote and it's all [00:48:00] together. Like you can hold it all together and see it all in a relationship, which we just want to 

[00:48:05] Dan Fellars: hope that. And people can, can reach out to you. Brownbirdconsulting. com. I love your website.

[00:48:11] It's very beautiful. 

[00:48:12] Heather Brown: Thanks. It's brand new. I've been working on it this year to sort of hold all of these ideas and And be a good platform. So Annie Gerway, Gerway Design Studio did a great job. 

[00:48:24] Dan Fellars: All right. Nicely. So if you're in the publishing world, reach out to Heather. Awesome. Thank you, Heather, for coming on.

[00:48:31] Heather Brown: Thank you very much. 

[00:48:33] Dan Fellars: We'll move on. 

[00:48:34] BUILTONAIR AIRTABLE COMMUNITY - 00:48:37

[00:48:36] And if you would like to join our amazing community with fellow lovers of Airtable and no code, join us built on air. com slash join. We'll get you in. It's free to join. And lots of lively discussion. Thousands of users of air table are in there and talking every day.

[00:48:53] So join us at built on air. com 

[00:48:57] A CASE FOR INTERFACE - CONDITIONAL EDITING [00:49:00] WITH KAMILLE - 00:49:13

[00:49:01] Kamille, let's learn about conditional editing. There you go. 

[00:49:08] Kamille Parks: All right. So something that I've started to do in some of the interfaces I've built are having sections that are conditionally editable based on, you know, a variety of factors. A common pattern I've seen is having things in draft mode, and once you are complete with something, then it's finalized, it shouldn't be editable.

[00:49:33] Another paradigm is if you only, if something should always be editable, but only editable if it's your record and then just view only for everyone else. And so there's both of those two different use cases can be accomplished basically the same way. So right now what I'm showing is a very simple interface with only three really editable [00:50:00] fields before I start touching it.

[00:50:03] This is from one of the templates. Your table offers for I believe conferencing and it came with it a field for confirmed, which is either a yes or a no. So what I've done is I've added the three fields I want to be able to edit at least some of the time and then a button that has an action or set the value of confirmed to yes.

[00:50:28] And when you have a a button that's set up that way, if it's already the value that it's supposed to set, then the button becomes non click. So if I go to another record where the answer is no, I have the ability to confirm my submission, which will change the value. But if I do that, Nothing changes right away for having things editable.

[00:50:51] So, here's what I would do if I want to make things only editable if confirmed is no, [00:51:00] or confirmed is not yes, because it's possible for this field to be blank. So you can see how everything is set up. Pretty simple. It's just these three fields inside of a group. What I would want to do is add another group, and I'm gonna call this submission details, and all I'm doing is adding those same fields again, but instead I'm going to keep them uneditable.

[00:51:33] When you add a. Field to an interface by default. It's going to come in as read only just as a tip If you want to set all of the fields in a group as editable in one go You can click on the group itself and go under permissions and hit editable in this case, I do want to keep things as view only so i'll do that But that's just a quick time saver So now if I preview [00:52:00] I have the same fields twice This is editable, and these are not, so I'm halfway there.

[00:52:06] The next thing that I would want to do is, with my group selected, I want to adjust my visibility. So, in this case, I want this to be visible when the confirmed is yes or yes. I want the non editable version to be present when it's yes. And I also want to make sure that my editable version is set up in the inverse.

[00:52:38] So I want this group, the editable one, is not yes. So if I preview, this is confirmed so I shouldn't be able to edit anything. Same for this one. And if I keep going, hopefully I'll find one that's not confirmed. So [00:53:00] this one, I can continue editing. This is a test. And if I do my button now, now everything is confirmed.

[00:53:10] That first session goes away, and now the read only copy is available. So, just as a note, when you're editing your interface, this can sometimes get a little confusing, which is why I like to give the two different groups different titles, so I can quickly visually see what the difference between these two actually are.

[00:53:34] And then, the second thing I wanted to demonstrate is, Making things visible conditionally based on a user field. The process is exactly the same but there's a little bit of nuance. Fun fact, apparently if you create a base from a template and you're looking at the the demo data that comes in with the template created by is blank it doesn't have a [00:54:00] value which I think is strange.

[00:54:01] So in that case i'm going to create a brand new record I'm going to call this Setup Brand New Session.

[00:54:16] So once this is created, now this is the only record that is created by myself. And then if I look at my editability options, I can make this even more specific. And say, only allow me to edit this if it's not yet confirmed, and the created by is the current user. When you're looking at a filter in an interface, the first option is going to be whomever is the user.

[00:54:47] Performing this action, in this case Kamille Parks, and then the second option would be current user. You want to do current user most of the time because that is going to change by whomever is actually looking at [00:55:00] the interface page. Not whomever is actively editing the interface. So although the end result in this case is the same, current user is Kamille Parks.

[00:55:12] I want to make sure I do current user so that anyone who looks at this So if I preview again, this one that I just created is editable because it's not confirmed. And it's editable by me, but the one I was looking at earlier, which was 

[00:55:33] Dan Fellars: You confirmed now? 

[00:55:35] Kamille Parks: I've lost it. Oh, yeah, you're right. I did. Whoops. Oh, well, but hopefully you get the picture if it's Not confirmed and it's created by myself Then i'm able to edit and if someone else were to log in right now, they would see nothing So that's another condition that you want to consider If it's [00:56:00] created by someone who isn't me and it's not confirmed this page would be blank.

[00:56:07] So I could demonstrate that by just messing with my filter a little bit and say is not current user. This is what someone who isn't Kamille would see at the moment. So what do you do in this instance? What you could do is have another group that you would say, let's call this submission pending, and I can add a little description and say, this submission is not yet confirmed.

[00:56:45] Check later. Or something of that effect. And then I would set my conditions for this to try and match this condition. I want to do [00:57:00] when confirmed is not yes, and where created by is current user. Now, ordinarily, we would do is not current user, and this one's filter would be is current user. That's because I'm demoing.

[00:57:20] The conditions are now in this case, since I shouldn't be able to edit it, but it hasn't been confirmed rather than just seeing something blank. I have at least a little bit of text on here that tells me some now would be as good as time as any to. Echo air tables own warning when you're using conditionally visible groups or fields within an interface.

[00:57:47] It's not really meant to be a security feature because it is still possible for you to look at sort of the underlying code for this page and get access to the data that is hidden. [00:58:00] Those two sections that I added above this still technically exist on the page. They're just not. Visible right now. So if it's critical data that needs that absolutely needs to be hidden for privacy reasons, I wouldn't necessarily rely on this approach.

[00:58:19] You might need something with stronger privacy concerns built in. But if it's. A sort of high level simple tool. I think this approach would work well. I will note that if you're doing this for something that is supposed to be mobile friendly right now conditional groups do not work. So. I believe the current behavior is if I were to look at this on a phone, none of the three sections I made would be visible because if it has a condition applied Airtable simply just doesn't show it on mobile.

[00:58:55] And then secondarily, this interface page type, the record review, [00:59:00] That's not available on on mobile anyway. So for two reasons, I wouldn't be able to use this on mobile, but largely because conditional groups in general aren't available yet.

[00:59:14] Dan Fellars: Very cool. That's an awesome trick. 

[00:59:17] Alli Alosa: Yeah, I like that. And I imagine you could take it as far as you want to with, like, if if you wanted someone to be able to edit the submission again or edit the session again, you could have another button on the. Read only one and flip back and forth, maybe until 

[00:59:33] Kamille Parks: it 

[00:59:33] Alli Alosa: was met or something.

[00:59:34] Yeah, I like if I 

[00:59:35] Kamille Parks: had another field that was something like, who is the reviewer for this record? They might see a for the non editable version, I might give them a button that would be like, update this action from confirmed back into no. And then. That would give the original submitter the ability to edit [01:00:00] things again and then re submit.

[01:00:01] So, you'd be able to flip things back and forth and then control who has the ability to perform that flip. 

[01:00:09] Alli Alosa: Yeah, and they have visibility on the buttons now themselves, which is yeah, awesome. 

[01:00:17] Kamille Parks: So for the button that I have, because I'm hiding this whole section, we wouldn't necessarily see the benefit in this exact example, but you can hide the button itself.

[01:00:29] So you might not necessarily need to show the word confirmed once. Once we've done it, because I have the field visible up here, what you could do is hide that button specifically. So, I can hide it. If it is yes, and then I'll turn off the visibility on this section really quickly, just so that I did that backwards.

[01:00:54] Something I tend to do is not yes. So [01:01:00] now that it's confirmed, I can hide that button away because there's no additional action for anyone to perform. So there's a lot you could do with conditional visibility. And, I think it's a pretty useful tool. Again, not so great if you have really specific. Very required privacy.

[01:01:19] Concerns, but really good. If you just need something like this to keep yourself organized, so you don't edit stuff that's already been confirmed, 

[01:01:29] Dan Fellars: excellent, great stuff. As always, Kamille, thank you. And that concludes today's show. We will see you next week. Thank you, Heather, for joining. Good luck with everything and come back on when you've got your base further along.

[01:01:43] We'll show it again. Thanks so much. All right. See [01:02:00] everybody.

[01:02:05] OUTRO

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