8/13/2024 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S19-E06

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

In This Episode

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

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

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

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

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:01:40 –

Following Articles Used in this Segment:

[] InAir – Enhancing Media Production Soundscapes Behind the Scenes with Airtable and InAir

[] New field Type – Fields from Library

[] new Interface Overview layout

[] Airtable on Forbes Cloud 100

[] Airtable looking for Third Party Risk Specialist

[LinkedIn] Allie received her Airtable Builder Cert!

[LinkedIn] Airtable leadership team

[LinkedIn] new plugin: Airtable to Google Maps by WePlugins

[LinkedIn] Airtable academy available to all in October

[LinkedIn] MailerSend updates Airtable integration

[LinkedIn] Fillout Forms – new feature – Workflows

[LinkedIn] Noloco customization + Hubspot integration

[LinkedIn] Relay.app updates – use AI in automation

[Web] BubbleCon 2024 | Get Tickets to the Annual User Conference

[BuiltOnAir Community] Basefront front end app updates

[BuiltOnAir Community] Airtable – low 5 per second limit workaround

Meet the Creators – 00:01:40 –

Meet Gavin Adams.

I am a Software Engineer in Glasgow, Scotland. I run AMJ Studio and we focus on building reliable and powerful software solutions, including CSV Getter.

Visit them online

An App a Day – 00:01:41 –

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the CSV Getter App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Easily create an export URL for an Airtable base. Download your Airtable data as CSV or JSON. Use your URL in automatic processes like backups and analytics.”.

View App

A Case for Interface – 00:01:42 –

Explore Interfaces with “Overview Page Layout”.

Airtable recently launched a new Overlay Page Layout for Interfaces. Alli will walk us through how it works..

View Example Base

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:01:40

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

Following Articles Used in this Segment:

[] InAir – Enhancing Media Production Soundscapes Behind the Scenes with Airtable and InAir

[] New field Type – Fields from Library

[] new Interface Overview layout

[] Airtable on Forbes Cloud 100

[] Airtable looking for Third Party Risk Specialist

[LinkedIn] Allie received her Airtable Builder Cert!

[LinkedIn] Airtable leadership team

[LinkedIn] new plugin: Airtable to Google Maps by WePlugins

[LinkedIn] Airtable academy available to all in October

[LinkedIn] MailerSend updates Airtable integration

[LinkedIn] Fillout Forms – new feature – Workflows

[LinkedIn] Noloco customization + Hubspot integration

[LinkedIn] Relay.app updates – use AI in automation

[Web] BubbleCon 2024 | Get Tickets to the Annual User Conference

[BuiltOnAir Community] Basefront front end app updates

[BuiltOnAir Community] Airtable – low 5 per second limit workaround

Segment: Meet the Creators

Start Time: 00:01:40

Gavin Adams –

Meet Gavin Adams.

I am a Software Engineer in Glasgow, Scotland. I run AMJ Studio and we focus on building reliable and powerful software solutions, including CSV Getter.

Visit them online

Segment: An App a Day

Start Time: 00:01:41

Airtable App Showcase – CSV Getter – Easily create an export URL for an Airtable base. Download your Airtable data as CSV or JSON. Use your URL in automatic processes like backups and analytics.

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the CSV Getter App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Easily create an export URL for an Airtable base. Download your Airtable data as CSV or JSON. Use your URL in automatic processes like backups and analytics.”.

View App

Segment: A Case for Interface

Start Time: 00:01:42

Overview Page Layout

Explore Interfaces with “Overview Page Layout”.

Airtable recently launched a new Overlay Page Layout for Interfaces. Alli will walk us through how it works..

View Example Base

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 On2Wear backups. Sign up today with promo code built on air for a 10 percent discount. Check them out at onto air. com. And now let's check out today's episode and see what we built on air.

[00:01:37] Dan Fellars: We are live. Welcome back to the built on air podcast, episode six of season 19. Good to be with you, myself and Ali Alosa returning. And we have special guests, Gavin Adams. Welcome, Gavin. Hello. Good to have you on. We'll learn more about Gavin and his story later in the show. I'll first walk us through what we're going to be talking about today.

[00:01:59] As [00:02:00] always built on air. We do an hour long show, keep you up to date on everything in the no code, low code world, tailored around Airtable. And we always start with our around the bases of what's going on in the communities, then a spotlight on our sponsor on to where backups, then we'll learn more about Gavin and his story and everything going on in his world, then he's going to showcase his app that he's got in the marketplace CSV getter.

[00:02:29] And then how to join our community. And then finally, Ali's gonna walk us through the new overview layout for interfaces. 

[00:02:40] ROUND THE BASES - 00:02:47

[00:02:41] Okay, with that round the bases, let's start with an announcement, that, we, we talked, we've talked about this several times, but the new, The new academy they say is going to be available for everyone in [00:03:00] October.

[00:03:00] So I know there was questions, people asking like, what tier is this available to? So right now it's not available to everyone. But it looks like coming in October that will be opened up to everyone. So I believe now it might just be enterprise or invite only. I did see Ali, you completed the certification.

[00:03:20] Congrats. 

[00:03:21] Alli Alosa: Thank you. 

[00:03:23] Dan Fellars: Yeah, I was 

[00:03:23] Alli Alosa: impressed. They put it together nicely. 

[00:03:28] Dan Fellars: So yeah, it's pretty cool. You can get, there is certification, but there's also just, lessons that you can follow and learn. And so, and there's two certifications. There's a builder certification. Or is there only one? Do they have a developer certification?

[00:03:45] Alli Alosa: I think just for partners, 

[00:03:47] Dan Fellars: but yeah, I think that's separate. Okay. Yeah. Maybe there's just one. So I, I also completed that as well. I got my certification on that front. So. [00:04:00] Officially certified. Yeah. So just kind of talking about that. But yeah, definitely worth checking out. It's a good, good good place to learn.

[00:04:12] And let's talk about new features. This is the 1 that the alley is going to be diving into. Ben Green was the 1st to spot it from what I saw. So this shows up when you, when you choose a layout, when you first create an interface, you can select the overview. So we'll dive deep into this with Ali later in the show.

[00:04:37] Let's see.

[00:04:44] Okay. So some commentary there. All right. Here's another one. This one. Max spotted this in the wild. So I believe this is enterprise only. And now when you do a [00:05:00] create new field, well, there's, there's a lot of things going on here. But where it was noticed was if you create a new field, this now shows up as a potential field type.

[00:05:12] It says fields from library. This does require like some set up. If you're an enterprise user, maybe in a future show, I'll showcase this. I've been playing with this extremely powerful potential for what you can do with this. It's a much broader managed applications managed, you know, managed components.

[00:05:37] So if you if you're looking to standardize and kind of create applications, Fields that you want to use across bases. If you're an enterprise and you've got multiple teams, you want to kind of standardize, the field configurations. You can now kind of do this in one place and publish them, and then they can become available either as a [00:06:00] field or even a full blown base.

[00:06:03] You can, you can have these managed components, and how they work is once you publish them into this library. You can then reference them, but you can't modify them. You can only like only the admin can modify them at the library level. And so once they make changes to and publish that, it will actually get distributed to anybody that's, that's referencing those library fields or components.

[00:06:28] So pretty, pretty cool stuff. 

[00:06:32] Alli Alosa: That is really exciting. 

[00:06:33] Dan Fellars: Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how we, we start to incorporate this with clients cause it it really opens up a lot of things. There's, there's some pros and cons. There's some cons. I'm like, do I want that? So you gotta, you gotta be smart about it. But it does, does have a lot of potential.

[00:06:56] All right, let's do. This is another [00:07:00] one. Josh kind of mentions if you're dealing with, API. So if you're a developer, one of the limitations of the air table API is, is a 55 per second limit per base. And so if you have, if you have, I think it's per API key or authentication. I believe so. So if you're using the same authentication, you know, in an app, it will, it will track this and it will, it basically, if you hit this limit, it will put like a 30 second wait on it.

[00:07:41] And so you'll get aired out for 30 seconds, and then you have until you can try again. So anyways, he has a good workaround. He recommends this hookdeck. com. I've never used this, but it definitely was [00:08:00] intriguing because we do a lot of API work. But it basically sits in the middle and it has better like delayed, to allow you to filter and to and to put in delays and things like that to monitor your API usage.

[00:08:18] So it's like a pretty cool tool does cost money, but might be worth it if you're a heavy power API user. 

[00:08:28] Gavin - CSV Getter: Yeah, that does look really interesting. It's certainly a challenge dealing with rate limits, learning to pump the brakes and hold off. So if something can do that outta the box, I definitely wanna check it out.

[00:08:39] Yep, 

[00:08:39] Dan Fellars: yep. Yeah, I'm sure you run into that as well. Yeah. Okay. Let's go to the, the what's new page. Let's see. So they did talk about. We already talked about linked records, and then this is the new one, the overview layout. And [00:09:00] then this, this has been around. We've, we spotted this maybe a month or two ago.

[00:09:06] But now I think it looks like it's rolled out for everyone now at the top of the, of the the, the application where it says data automations interfaces. There's now another section that's kind of segmented out for forms. And so they kind of made forms a first class citizen at that level. And this forms is the interface forms, not the, I guess there's three or four other types of forms.

[00:09:38] Yeah. 

[00:09:39] Alli Alosa: Yeah. And the interface forms it's, there's two different types of interface forms too. There's the internal one, and then there's this one, which is able to be shared externally, which is a. Big distinction. But now actually they actually, I don't know if this is, I don't know how new this is, but if you accidentally create a [00:10:00] form that you had intended to share publicly, but you do it on the internal interface page, there's now a way to, you can click the three little dots and convert it to a shareable form, which that's really good.

[00:10:13] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's new. I don't remember seeing that. Definitely on the old, you know, layout. Those could be converted. Can you create, you can still create legacy old forms, right? Or do they stop you from creating new ones? 

[00:10:30] Alli Alosa: You can, they just try and point you towards this. Like, if you go and create a new form view, it'll give you a little pop up that's like, Go here, but then there's a button.

[00:10:40] I think as of like last week, there was still a button on it that said no create form view. But I had kind of had, I mean, I very rarely use air table forms at all just because of the crazy security risks that they can come with. If you don't know what you're doing. But [00:11:00] the functionality of the interface form, the new version of everything, it's a lot nicer.

[00:11:07] You can stack fields next to each other. There's a lot of things that you can do in that version that you can't do in the form view. So I'm happy about that, but I really can't wait until you can restrict the values of like, you know, linked record dropdowns. That'll be a game changer. 

[00:11:27] Dan Fellars: Is there anything in the legacy that has not been ported over to the new one?

[00:11:32] Alli Alosa: No, once upon a time, the new one was missing redirect options, but you can redirect now, which is great. Again, only in the publicly shareable one in interfaces, if you're doing it in the. Internal interface form layout. Bless you. 

[00:11:54] Dan Fellars: There 

[00:11:56] Alli Alosa: is no redirect. So again, I very rarely use those [00:12:00] form layouts and interfaces just because it's like you hit create and it's like, okay, it created it, but now what?

[00:12:06] Like now you need to find it somewhere else. Yeah, I don't think there's anything that the form view can do that the publicly shareable form and interfaces cannot. 

[00:12:18] Dan Fellars: That's good to know. All right. So yeah, you're using forms. You'll you'll see that now. So I think those are the latest updates. A couple of things from from linked in wanted to highlight.

[00:12:35] So this one is a new app. I haven't seen before, so it caught my attention. If you if you do a lot of like geo location stuff inside of air table. This app can now pull directly from your air table data. So this is not an extension. I don't believe inside of air table. This is a third party. Site that you would go [00:13:00] to.

[00:13:00] You might be able to embed from here. But it now can can pull directly from from air table. So if you're doing intense mapping, this might be a cool tool to check out and use to visualize your air table data into an interactive map. 

[00:13:21] Alli Alosa: It's exciting. People are always looking for options with that.

[00:13:23] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there is, there is an extension for Google maps. But this looks like it's probably more detailed advanced. All right. And then one more shout out to our friends at fill out. They're now getting into, they're almost becoming full blown tool. They now have workflows, which is kind of crazy.

[00:13:49] These guys are just producing product like crazy. And so they now have like a Zapier like or automations like interface to, to [00:14:00] trigger and perform tasks when a form is submitted or abandoned or even just scheduling. Yeah, lots of different things. So it's pretty good. Oh, and no 

[00:14:13] Alli Alosa: automation, no charges, they're saying.

[00:14:16] In beta, they're footing the OpenAI bill. That's pretty cool. 

[00:14:21] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, take advantage of that. So, that is awesome. And that concludes everything in the Airtable communities. If we missed something, if there's something you want us to highlight, let us know. And with that, let's move on to On2Air.

[00:14:41] ON2AIR BACKUPS FOR AIRTABLE SPOTLIGHT - 00:14:41

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[00:15:04] So check it out at onto where. com use promo code built on air for a discount and try it out today. 

[00:15:11] MEET THE CREATORS - GAVIN ADAMS - CSVGETTER.COM

[00:15:14] All right, Gavin, also similar space that Gavin's playing in. Yeah, that's right. Move you in here. The big screen. Cool. Gavin, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're located, what you're up to and and kind of how you came into this world of Bear Table.

[00:15:34] Gavin - CSV Getter: Sure thing. Well, yeah, firstly, thank you very much for having me. I'm Gavin. I'm the founder of csvgetter. com, which is an export app. Which works really well with Airtable. I'm based in Glasgow, Scotland, and yeah, so I kind of came into Airtable in a funny way. Well, I worked in tech for three years at a company called Skyscanner, which I'm not sure how [00:16:00] sort of well known it is in the U S in the U S.

[00:16:03] I know you have Google flights and kayak and Skyscanner. It's the same thing. If you want to go on a trip you, you know, search where you want to go. And Skyscanner will show you all the options for flights and what airlines you can go on to. So the same thing as before. Basically Google flights and a great tech company.

[00:16:21] I worked in there. I came out of university as a grad and I was on a grad scheme. And one of my placements in my grad scheme was all to do with automation. So I had a great manager at the time and he was working in the. the advertising part of the company. So on Skyscanner, there's a lot of airlines who want to run ads on Skyscanner.

[00:16:41] And there's a lot of ops that take place to basically get those ads on, on the website. So for the team, there's a lot of hard work, basically delivering these ads for the partners, making sure the ads look right, making sure the partners are happy. There's a lot of work that goes on there working with Google ad manager.

[00:16:59] And there was [00:17:00] So much room for automation. And this manager I had, he yeah, he kind of worked out that I loved kind of coding, tinkering away with code and automating stuff. So he basically said, look, my team, they work with Google ad manager. Can you connect to the APIs and basically figure out if you can sort out some of the painful processes they have and try and save them time.

[00:17:25] And I just absolutely loved doing this. I loved kind of speaking to the team. Working out what their problems are, going into the documentation of Google Ad Manager and seeing if it can be done to build them like a nifty little tool to make their jobs easier. It was, that challenge was just, just really fun.

[00:17:42] You can see if it's possible and then you can make something which you know, is going to be useful to someone and it's going to save them time and also get like a really good feedback loop. So it was just a great experience. And I think at that point I really. Worked out. I just loved building tech for ultimate [00:18:00] automation.

[00:18:00] I loved coding, but when you're automating stuff for someone, you can really understand the value that, that you're giving them. So, basically, I continued at Skyscanner for a while, but during the pandemic, I decided I wanted to leave. And start my own business and that primarily involved freelance consulting, freelance software engineering, but I did kind of want to build automation tools as well, which kind of work out the box and people just log on and sign in.

[00:18:30] And around about the same time I, I, I discovered Airtable, I think it was through Twitter. And a friend who is using it as well. And I think I had a client using it. Also, I'm less of an air table user myself. I'm really more of just a coder who likes to automate stuff. So in terms of understanding, the real sort of nuances of using air table, that's perhaps something.

[00:18:53] I don't have much experience in, but it did become clear that lots of people were using this platform to do [00:19:00] really cool stuff. And, and lots of people loved automating stuff. And there's definitely loads of room for building powerful plugins there to basically fill gaps. So I kind of came into. the Airtable community that way to really looking for problems to solve for people using it rather than using it myself.

[00:19:19] And I think I got hooked pretty quickly because it had pretty good forums, community spaces, like the, the community that, that you guys reached out to me on the built on air community. I could see that everyone's kind of chatting and, doing really cool stuff, but also loads of gaps to fill. The main one that I saw over and over again was that people Didn't either.

[00:19:43] It didn't have a way, obviously you can export CSV and air table. You can just go on and do that, but a way of doing it kind of reliably and automatically, there didn't seem to be any way, which was surprising. And having a look at the API I realized that it can, it can be done. Obviously if [00:20:00] you work with the rate limits properly, as we were discussing earlier, if you format the data properly, so I basically built the script for exporting in CSV format.

[00:20:11] And that basically. I realized that I was solving a problem for people and then eventually just by giving this to people, realizing people were using it, listening to feedback, it's become this kind of fully fledged SAS product, which can export air table. It can export notion and then also it can just be a simple API builder by uploading a CSV and that's CSV getter dot com and that's my product.

[00:20:36] And so it's a product which works really well for air table still primarily is. For air table. And yeah, that's what I'm going to showcase today. 

[00:20:46] Dan Fellars: Did you, did you explore other platforms initially, or was it always Zertable? Was it always the original? 

[00:20:56] Gavin - CSV Getter: Yeah, I explored Miro as well. I did actually [00:21:00] build an automation export tool for Miro mind maps also, and This week, these two tools are combining.

[00:21:06] So CSV getter, the mirror plugin is going to be part of CSV getter as well. And the problem there is kind of people have these hierarchy mind map structures. And again, exporting to CSV is not, It's not that, it's not a strong native feature. So, it's building a plugin, which, which does it in a way that really solves a niche problem for people.

[00:21:30] So yeah, Miro as well notion Google sheets as well, but air table was pretty, it was the, the, the. The main focus straight away because of the the marketplace and the community all being strong and all being great places to listen to customer feedback Gotcha, very cool. 

[00:21:49] Dan Fellars: And do you have I can't remember Do you have an extension in the marketplace or it's it's just your website?

[00:21:57] Gavin - CSV Getter: It's not an extension No, it's it's a separate [00:22:00] website a separate tool, in the demo that i'm going to show in a moment it uses you can you log on first to csv getter and then you connect to air table using oauth 

[00:22:11] Dan Fellars: Gotcha. Cool. And how how has it been developing with the Airtable platform? 

[00:22:18] Gavin - CSV Getter: So, yeah, I've, I've found it pretty good overall.

[00:22:23] There were some challenges, I guess. So when the OAuth came, I think before, when I started the app, I don't think OAuth was an option. I think it was just actually had people actually had to trust the app and put their API key into it. Right. That, you know, that's obviously takes very trustworthy person to do.

[00:22:42] So now it's, it's better to have a more secure way of connecting. So I think dealing with API keys, first, yeah, dealing with API keys and then API keys being deprecated and warning people that their links are not going to work, that was a challenge. But. And [00:23:00] then eventually working out how the OAuth worked and connect building that functionality.

[00:23:04] That was a challenge as well, but it was all possible. And I think the documentation is pretty good. I'm still kind of still learning the nuances of the, the OAuth and I'm still kind of testing it heavily because it's a lot of asynchronous processes going on here with this OAuth connection, making sure it's working properly.

[00:23:23] But overall it's all been possible. It's all been manageable. So I've enjoyed working with it overall, for sure. 

[00:23:32] Dan Fellars: Yeah, very cool. And what what's your, how has like AI impacted kind of what you're thinking in this world? 

[00:23:42] Gavin - CSV Getter: Yeah, great question. So so, I was gonna, I'll show you in a wee bit, but the way the app works is people can create kind of export URLs with their Airtable data.

[00:23:53] So I did add like a, an AI feature at one point where people could, you know, Basically pass a parameter in the [00:24:00] URL and with a, with an AI prompt which I may go back to I thought it was pretty cool. I didn't notice there was interest, but as to how functional and what problem that solved. I wasn't quite sure.

[00:24:11] So I thought it was definitely quite, quite gimmicky as a first feature and it would definitely require going back and actually build it, adding a feature which is useful with AI. And I've noticed that the app CSV Getter has been great at allowing people to feed data into AI. So I think I had a Perplexity user who was quite excited how they can just log on, create a URL, which has there.

[00:24:35] Airtable data as a live feed and then just passing that into some sort of AI bot, which will follow that link to get the data. So that's one option there. So there will be chances to add AI stuff into the app itself or to create guides, which allow people to use AI with their data, but it's quite difficult to work out what's just very exciting and very cool.

[00:24:59] And what's [00:25:00] actually useful and what people actually need, like, what's like a, a vitamin and what's a painkiller, you know, what do people are nice to have and what do they actually need. So, yeah, AI is cool. And then, of course it helps with coding if you do so in a very kind of modular way. So, as a programmer, I find you can do some stuff very quickly.

[00:25:20] Yeah, if you if you get used to prompting a I in the right way. So yeah, it's been exciting. I don't know if you guys found the same. 

[00:25:29] Dan Fellars: Yeah, yeah, similar. Yeah, you're like trying to make sense of where it fits in. All right, why don't we jump in your product? Let me do a quick transition here. Bring us back.

[00:25:44] Okay. 

[00:25:45] AN APP A DAY - CSV GETTER FOR AIRTABLE - 00:25:54

[00:25:49] So as you as Gavin mentioned he's the founder of CSV getter. And we're going to go through that if you want to share your screen. Okay, [00:26:00] 

[00:26:01] Gavin - CSV Getter: yep. So,

[00:26:07] can you see the, oh yeah, cool, you can see it. Nice, so yeah, as I say, csvgetter, it's its own platform. It's csvgetter. com, it's an export app. I'm going to start this demo logged in. So basically, as I say, you can connect, you basically log into this platform here and you can connect to air table using the off connection.

[00:26:30] So this is our account screen. This is going to get kind of an update soon because there's some, some work that we can do here. But it's very easy to connect to air table. Once you're logged in, you connect to air table with this button. And now that we have the, Authentication configures, you just select the data that you want to give it access to and then you go ahead and press grant access and then this will redirect you back into the, the CSV getter platform and inform you that you're connected to air table.

[00:26:59] You can [00:27:00] also connect by setting a personal access token which is obviously a bit more of a roundabout way to do it, but it's very robust. So that's one way to connect as well. So I'm going to start straight off the bat and say, CSP Getter is a paid platform. We work really hard at it to make it kind of secure, robust, and reliable.

[00:27:19] We expect people to pay to use it. To, you get a free trial, obviously to, to set up stuff and set up your pipelines, but to keep them alive, it's a subscription fee. But what we don't expect is we don't expect people to pay for it or enter their car details without trying it first, and we don't expect people to connect their own data without trying it first.

[00:27:41] So we have like this completely open sandbox environment in the app. Which you don't have to log in at all to try. So I'm actually going to log out to do this demo just to show you how straightforward the sandboxes the sandbox connects to a demo base that we've created. It's just an [00:28:00] air table template base, which was available on basically on the air table template marketplace.

[00:28:08] So yeah, the sandbox is you just go to csvdata. com, no logging in, no card details, no connection. You can just press try the sandbox and launch the Airtable demo and it will connect to the demo base. It will create a new export URL, which is what we're all about, these export URLs, which are pretty powerful.

[00:28:28] But really what are we looking at here? This is the same sort of screen you see when you're logged in, connected to your own data, but as I say, the We're connected to this base here. You can preview the demo base just by clicking the button. This is an air table base, as I'm sure you'll recognize. And we've got a few views here as well.

[00:28:47] So here's the main view, which just shows all the data. There's filtered views. This one's just office furniture, for example, which is a subset of this data. And because we've connected CSV [00:29:00] getter and given permission to view this base, You can see that we have gone in, we've created an export URL by launching this demo.

[00:29:09] You can select the base and the table that you're interested in and even down to the view. And by default, all data is selected, and then you get something called an export URL. And this is just a URL, which is going to spit out all of the Airtable data. As a CSV, and this URL can be called upon to give the data at any time.

[00:29:33] So just to demo that, have you guys used Postman before? Have you heard of it? Yep. I'm going to demo these URLs using Postman. So if you've not heard of Postman, it's just an app for, basically, it's a really powerful app for trying out API endpoints. So, just like a browser, you can hit a URL, but you can also try different endpoints, like post, patch, and delete, for example.

[00:29:57] So, using Postman, which is a great way to [00:30:00] preview how this app works, it'll show you that all this data has come out in CSV format. So you don't have to export all your fields, and you can use this platform to kind of cherry pick what sort of data you want. So I can go ahead and unselect all fields, only select name, unit cost.

[00:30:19] Size, for example, and as you see, going back into Postman, that same URL, we've now changed the nature of the data that's coming out. It'll show, it'll bring the entire base. This screen only shows a sample of the data, but really what we're doing here is we're pulling the entire table or view that you've selected as a CSV format.

[00:30:42] So why is this useful? Well, a URL like this, It's kind of very powerful. It fits into lots of processes. One of them, of course, being backups, which I'm sure you, you know, all about. But also it's less of a backup tool. You can obviously use this tool to back up, but this is more of an API [00:31:00] building tool.

[00:31:01] So you can also use this URL to, to Synchronize your data with Excel, which is a big ask. So obviously Airtable is powerful in that it's like Excel, but can do so much more, but there's still some use cases where people want to have this data in Excel, whether they want to work with it offline or whether they want to just use some.

[00:31:22] Some classic Excel functionality and with a live export, you're like, this is very easy to get your data into Excel. I'm actually on Mac. So I'm not going to demo. I'm just going to refer to the guide, which kind of has all the screenshots from if I was on window, because on windows, it's. It's really kind of straightforward.

[00:31:45] If you look at this guide that we have here there's the, a URL like the one we've just generated in the demo, and really it's just a question of opening up an Excel workbook, pressing data, pressing from web, pasting that [00:32:00] URL in, and pressing OK. previewing your data, press load, and then your Excel workbook is kind of updated with your latest Airtable data.

[00:32:09] And you can go ahead and refresh that anytime. So it's really good for if you're working on a report which needs live data from Airtable refreshed at a cadence. If you're wanting to back up locally, it's very 

[00:32:22] Alli Alosa: powerful. 

[00:32:27] Gavin - CSV Getter: So, so yeah, that's, that's definitely like a use case Excel. And then of course, you can, You can use it for Google Sheets and you can use it just to deposit the CSV in Dropbox, so, yeah, these URLs can be used anywhere.

[00:32:43] You might be thinking, Like how secure is this and obviously you can see that once you've got a url which gives a live feature data It makes things very easy, but it's completely open and that is one thing that to consider with a tool like this if you're using a url [00:33:00] like this to share data, then yeah It's kind of opening this data up to the world and making it publicly available So that's why we have a ui like this, which makes it very clear What data you're selecting.

[00:33:13] So if you're creating a share URL, you can use a screen like this to ensure that none of your columns are I've got anything that should not be shared. And then if you want to create a URL that is locked down. You can go ahead and enable off. So just clicking that, you can now have off enabled. And then you can add them like an off header.

[00:33:34] So now that I've got this enabled and it requires an off header, if I were to go back into postman and try this URL again, yeah, you can see that it would just serve me an error lock down off header missing. And then I would have to kind of provide the author authorization hair header in, in postman that would make it.

[00:33:57] Make it available again. [00:34:00] Oh, okay. Maybe not.

[00:34:09] Sometimes it takes me a while to synchronize up. So, doing that live. Yeah, there we go. Cool. So that's how Bearer Tokens work. Yeah, if if bearer tokens is anything that anyone would like to learn a bit more about and how they fit into API's we have a guide on on bearer tokens as well. So yeah, we've got kind of a comprehensive range of guides about loads of different things you can do with a product like this.

[00:34:40] Why? There's examples of stuff which like sharing data, which is not supposed to be secure or backing up data, which can be secure. We give examples of how you can use the bearer token in Excel, to basically set up that process, but add the extra layer of [00:35:00] security. So, yeah, there's really a lot that we can do.

[00:35:04] And the nice thing about these URLs, Which once you've got them up and going, is that we take advantage of URL parameters. So, if you're not really familiar with URL parameters, these are just variables that you can stick on to the end of an export URL. So, in the case of this one, I'm just going to To save, maybe just save all the auth there just to keep it open and simple.

[00:35:31] If we have, yeah, here we have this URL returning a CSV format. But let's say I want to use this URL in a different process where it's more preferable to have things as JSON. You can just stick a parameter at the end of this URL. So I'm saying type equals JSON records and then all of a sudden This is not this is no longer a CSV URL.

[00:35:56] It's a JSON URL so we can kind of get into Very simple read [00:36:00] only API building here and you can even pass in sql as a parameter here So you can stick on an extra parameter at the end saying With sql and we've got like a pop up here which shows All this stuff that you can add on to the end of this URL, and you're not updating the URL itself.

[00:36:20] You can use this asynchronously and loads of different processes. You're just sticking extra stuff on for different scenarios. So there's loads of extra powerful stuff that we've done with it where you can sort of pass and type and sequel at the same time and, yeah, when we add URL parameters all the time, because they're really kind of customizable, and it's very easy to sneak in a new parameter for a niche use case if anyone has any automation ideas.

[00:36:51] And another cool one that I'll show just to end the demo is it doesn't even have to be an API export thing. Let's say you wanted to embed, for [00:37:00] example one of these URLs as an HTML table, perhaps in a WordPress, then you just stick on the parameter dynamic table at the end. And now you've actually got a webpage, which is going to show this data, as like a filterable, paginated table.

[00:37:17] And this works really well as like an iframe embed in WordPress. So that's another way of sharing data and kind of, yeah. Creating a live feed to air table data without linking people into air table at all. So that's really what we're all about. Export and all its kind of formats. It's really modular, really powerful.

[00:37:37] These URLs can be used kind of all over the place. And when we're open to new ideas all the time. So if anyone has any cool ideas about what's to be added or how these URLs can be used, then, yeah, we love hearing from people. Thank you for giving me the chance to show it through and welcome any questions.

[00:37:55] Yeah. A 

[00:37:57] Dan Fellars: couple of questions. Do you, [00:38:00] do you have an answer? I'm not expecting you to, but do you have an answer for linked record values? 

[00:38:08] Gavin - CSV Getter: Yeah. So link records I first added it. So that, yeah. So here's a linked record type and it's not vendor would be linked record. It comes through as a record ID, which, so first I did add the feature of Like having it so that it would look up the primary field of link record, but it just slows the request way down.

[00:38:32] So I would just encourage people to create a lookup field, and, and have, and, and choose that in CSV getter. So like this, in this example, nothing comes up for this one, but finding the name of the link record in the lookup field and including that. Instead just keeps things super fast. So for this one to show the name, that would be a separate API call for each row.

[00:38:56] It would slow down the whole process. So we tried to [00:39:00] add it. It made things really slow. So instead I just encourage people to use lookup fields instead. Yeah, 

[00:39:09] Dan Fellars: that's, that's a big pain that we experience as well. I believe Airtable at some point will add a parameter where you can say like provide link record details or something.

[00:39:22] And at least it will, I think it will return a JSON array or ID in the name, and maybe you could even specify additional fields you could retrieve. That would be nice. 

[00:39:35] Alli Alosa: That would be nice. Because yeah, they do in the metadata, it. Even in Airtable automations, they have the ability to switch it from displaying as a name or an ID when using the linked record token.

[00:39:46] So if they could put that in the. API, that would be 

[00:39:51] Gavin - CSV Getter: awesome. Yeah, it would be fantastic because yes, currently it was every time. If you, 

[00:39:56] Dan Fellars: if you play with the, have you played with the [00:40:00] webhooks API? I think it's only enterprise, or maybe not. So it might be for others, but in the webhook API, that does show this new format where they're JSON objects and that has the ID and the name but that it's only available.

[00:40:20] On like a webhook notification. 

[00:40:24] Gavin - CSV Getter: Yeah. Yeah. I found it just too complicated, slowed everything down. And it would make requests timeout. So yeah, as yeah, I'm sure that as you'll know, obviously the larger the, because of pagination on the air table API, the larger the table that you're exporting, the longer the request is going to take.

[00:40:42] So it's set a timeout limit of, I think it's an hour hoping that most people Most people get their full export within an hour, but yeah, this looking up every linked record ID and filling it with a name that just exploded that time. So it wasn't on unless some [00:41:00] tweak to the API is made, as you mentioned.

[00:41:03] Dan Fellars: And are you caching the data on your end or is it always a live feed to the API? 

[00:41:09] Gavin - CSV Getter: It's always a 

[00:41:09] Dan Fellars: live 

[00:41:09] Gavin - CSV Getter: feed for air table. Yeah, it keeps things simple, keeps things more secure and yeah, any sort of connection information saved with the end to end encryption as well. We do have a separate system, where, yeah, you can upload a CSV.

[00:41:28] I forgot that was not logged in, but you can now up because I really like this kind of. Functionality of, the U. I. And the parameters and everything we thought would utilize that for other connection type. So connecting to notion and doing the same thing. And the other one is just, let's say, you just want to build a really simple read only A.

[00:41:47] P. I. Just upload a C. S. V. File. And you can use all that functionality the same way if you want that for an MVP or if you're building APIs and you want to keep things lean. So [00:42:00] we've got this CSV upload feature, which does store the data but that's like a separate system, but maybe one day if someone wanted to cache or, maybe we want to connect things to the Miro app it would be a way of, that would be like, Something that we could connect up, save a CSV to CSV getter as well.

[00:42:19] And that could be some sort of cache system if needed, but right now we just keep it a live connection. 

[00:42:27] Dan Fellars: Last question for me. If you put a SQL drop table, CSV getter, what would happen? 

[00:42:36] Gavin - CSV Getter: Nothing would happen. So the SQL is done in a way, which is, Yeah, it's kind of kept secure as possible, which is cash and it's all read only as well.

[00:42:50] Dan Fellars: That's good. Awesome. Thank you, Gavin, for sharing that. And so yeah, check them out, csvgetter. com. [00:43:00] And so Airtable, Notion and Miro will be coming in this week. 

[00:43:07] Gavin - CSV Getter: Our mirror app at the bottom here, which is available. But yeah, Airtable, Notion, Mirror, and Stacks CSV upload. All right. Awesome. Thank you.

[00:43:17] Thanks very much. 

[00:43:20] Dan Fellars: Okay, let's continue on. 

[00:43:22] BUILTONAIR AIRTABLE COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHT - 00:43:23

[00:43:24] Quick shout out, if you are not in our community to learn more about amazing people like Gavin and others, join us at builtonair. com slash join. We'll get you into our Slack community with thousands of amazing people. Airtable users and optimization experts and also get you access to our newsletter that goes out every week or two with an amazing content going out.

[00:43:47] We've refreshed the newsletter. So it's, it's really good, worthwhile. And the go to place to stay up to date on everything in this world of internal apps, no code, low code platforms and [00:44:00] Airtable in particular. So join us at built on air. com. All right. 

[00:44:06] A CASE FOR INTERFACE - 00:44:09

[00:44:08] Let's learn about overview layout. Ali, there you go. 

[00:44:15] Alli Alosa: Excellent.

[00:44:16] All right. So this one I'm pretty excited about. There is a new layout available in interface designer and we're going to unbox that basically right now. So I'm just going to flip into my edit screen. And I can go to the pages here and click this little plus to add a new page. And you'll notice there is a new layout and it's got a pretty little new token next to it.

[00:44:49] Unfortunately, it is only available on desktop right now. Looking forward to the day when all pages are available on mobile. But if I [00:45:00] go ahead and select that, it is super, super simple to set up. So essentially all it is, is kind of like a little menu or a, like a landing page. Navigation type layout where we can link off to different interface pages and it already comes kind of pre built with a few pages already set up for you.

[00:45:26] It's, this is not the most flexible layout, but it does look very simple. It's sleek and clean and it's super easy to customize a little bit. So, if I want to change which pages are being highlighted here, all I need to do is click on one of those and then go over to the right hand panel here and choose a new page here.

[00:45:49] I can also direct to those publicly shareable forms that we had talked about earlier, which is great. But if I want to switch what this is being pointed to, I can [00:46:00] just pick a new page and that will change what the title is here. This title is always going to match what the title is of your interface page as well.

[00:46:10] Then you can go ahead and add a description. So like you could just say this is a list of all requests. There is a character limit there. But that's all right. You can then add more, sections here, which is pretty limited. You can add bookmarks, which are essentially the same thing as what this is here, but you could point it at different, you know, So if you have more than one page, you can probably even point it at, actually you can.

[00:46:45] I have tested this. If you have more than one interface, so right now I've got just one interface here, but if I add an interface, I'll just call it interface two and just put in a dummy list layout for fun. [00:47:00] I can still point to that page in the other interface by adding a bookmark, which is great. So I can direct them to a different.

[00:47:11] Interface bundle of pages. It doesn't have to all be underneath this PTO hood here. So if you have different sections, like if you've got a whole bunch of different interfaces with different pages and categorize them by what, you know, their topic is, you could also have multiple bookmark sections here to direct people towards those.

[00:47:32] Other pages, which is great. What, 

[00:47:35] Dan Fellars: what happens if you don't have access to that interface? 

[00:47:40] Alli Alosa: It's a great question. It would just pop up and say you don't have access, and it would show the like, request access button. 

[00:47:48] Dan Fellars: We got another question from Alicia. Can it be an interface in a different base? 

[00:47:53] Alli Alosa: In a different base?

[00:47:55] Great question. No, not in this section here. [00:48:00] However, you could. copy that URL and put it over here in this section. So there is, I think over here, I haven't figured out, I think it's just called sidebar is what this section is. And you can add more groups to this sidebar, but essentially all they consist of is some text and some links.

[00:48:23] So you can add whatever links you want here. So you could put, A link to an interface in a different base here. The only downside, of course, is like, if you change it, or that URL changes, you're going to have to come back here and update that here as well. But it is doable. And then you can decide whether you want them to open in a new tab or not, which you is also very, very helpful.

[00:48:51] So if you got external URLs, you can put them over here. You can highlight important stuff. And [00:49:00] finally, you can also add a logo, and a cover image as well, which is great. So this basically becomes like a pretty little landing page for your, for your interface. I'm trying to see if I have a good image here I could throw up.

[00:49:25] But I don't know if I do. I've got my logo. Yeah, I'll just throw this in here.

[00:49:35] So, looks nice. And. If I just go ahead and hit publish. So that's what this looks like. I could have put a cover photo at the top as well. And each one of these will bring us to those pages over here on the side, which is very nice. So just a little bit a way to give your users some more information about what exactly they're trying to look at [00:50:00] in each interface, you can give directions and.

[00:50:03] More information, which is always useful, I think. 

[00:50:09] Dan Fellars: Yeah. So yeah, very, very opinionated, you know, as far as like the layout is concerned, you can't, you don't have a lot of functionality of, you can't even change which is on which side. 

[00:50:21] Alli Alosa: No, it's very rigid. So yeah, they are kind of, yeah, there's nowhere else to put this.

[00:50:29] You can only put it there and you can only display the sidebar. Yeah. Sidebar or not. So if you don't, then it just looks like this 

[00:50:39] Dan Fellars: and these can be shared publicly. 

[00:50:44] Alli Alosa: No, the overview, the overview layout currently cannot be shared publicly. Or on which is. A little annoying, but I guess it might [00:51:00] make sense for now, just because I'm pretty sure, pretty sure when you share an interface page, I think you're just sharing one of the pages, right?

[00:51:09] So you're not sharing the whole bundle. So I guess it makes sense that you wouldn't be able to just share the overview page because these links wouldn't work for anybody. So until you can share like the whole bundle in one. I kind of understand why they're not doing it. That's 

[00:51:26] Dan Fellars: what I was hoping, you know, cause it's kind of annoying that you can only share an individual page.

[00:51:32] I was hoping this could be shared. And then those links you could tie to a shared open page. So then you could have like a M a public menu of, of available pages that were shared publicly. 

[00:51:47] Alli Alosa: That would be nice. I am in the past before this, Was available. I've kind of and I'm going to put my foot in my mouth because I don't know off the top of my head if the record [00:52:00] review layout is publicly shareable.

[00:52:02] I don't think it is. But that's what I had done in the past was. I actually set up like I'd add a table to my database and. Put on it all the interface pages with links to each one and then have a record review layout where it's got the pages on the side, so it, it kind of like was a way of me faking a menu, with information about each page, but yeah, there's, there's still pros and cons to that, I think.

[00:52:33] Dan Fellars: Yeah, interesting. So, okay. So like if you click on share, it doesn't give you the public. 

[00:52:43] Alli Alosa: Yeah. And not this, yeah, this page is not supported for public sharing. 

[00:52:48] Dan Fellars: All right. So yeah, it's a good, it's a good you know, it's useful. It's a good starting point for, for any kind of app. So I [00:53:00] can see the value there, maybe you want a little bit more control over, over how you can display things, but definitely a good start.

[00:53:08] Alli Alosa: Yeah. I can't wait until they, even just the colors, like there's no options around color at all. But yeah, I'm looking forward to what's to come. Cause it's definitely a good step in the right direction. 

[00:53:24] Dan Fellars: Plus mobile as well. Cause it would be nice to have like a landing page for 

[00:53:29] Alli Alosa: Absolutely. It would.

[00:53:34] Dan Fellars: More to come. All right. Thank you for sharing that. 

[00:53:39] Alli Alosa: Of course. 

[00:53:40] Dan Fellars: Yeah. And that concludes today's show. We hope to see you next week on episode seven. Gavin, thanks again for joining us and best of luck going forward. We'll have you come on in a future season and get an update from you. That'd be great. Yeah.

[00:53:55] Thank you very much for having me. Take care everyone. We'll see you next week. [00:54:00] Thank you. Bye bye.''

[00:54:14] OUTRO - 00:54:16

[00:54:15] Thank you for joining today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to check out our sponsor, On2Air Backups, automated backups for air table. We'll see you next time on the Built on Air podcast.