4/8/2025 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S22-E01

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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 Creators – 00:01:41 –

Meet Ashley Guckert.

I’m Ashley! I have a decade of experience leading post-production and distribution at media conglomerates in NYC. That’s where I became an Airtable expert. My career has pivoted into the non-profit space, working with organizations focusing on social-emotional learning, political plurality, and supporting independent news organizations.

Base Showcase – 00:01:42 –

We dive into a full working base that will Ashley Guckert will walk everyone through the process of collecting quotes, reviewing quotes to determine viability, shipping the quotes for review out to panliests (used Fillout as a 3rd party form tool), and then how we analyzed the data weekly.

A Case for Interface – 00:01:42 –

Explore Interfaces with “Dynamic Number Coloring”.

Alli will demo number coloring for list/grid views in interfaces.

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 Creators

Start Time: 00:01:41

Ashley Guckert –

Meet Ashley Guckert.

I’m Ashley! I have a decade of experience leading post-production and distribution at media conglomerates in NYC. That’s where I became an Airtable expert. My career has pivoted into the non-profit space, working with organizations focusing on social-emotional learning, political plurality, and supporting independent news organizations.

Segment: Base Showcase

Start Time: 00:01:42

Quote Process Workflow

We dive into a full working base that will Ashley Guckert will walk everyone through the process of collecting quotes, reviewing quotes to determine viability, shipping the quotes for review out to panliests (used Fillout as a 3rd party form tool), and then how we analyzed the data weekly.

Segment: A Case for Interface

Start Time: 00:01:42

Dynamic Number Coloring

Explore Interfaces with “Dynamic Number Coloring”.

Alli will demo number coloring for list/grid views in interfaces.

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 onto air backups onto OnAir 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.

[00:00:47] Them with onto air [email protected]. 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 longtime [00:01:00] customer, David States OnAir backups might be the most critical piece of the puzzle to guard against unforeseeable disaster.

[00:01:06] It's easy to set up and it just works. Join Sarah, David, and hundreds more Airtable users like you to protect your Airtable data with OnAir backups. Sign up today with promo code built on air for a 10% discount. Check them out at On2Air.com. And now let's check out today's episode and see what we built on air.

[00:01:37] Dan Fellars: Welcome back, everybody to the Built On Air Podcast. We are back for season 22. This is episode one after being off for a few weeks. Good to be back with everybody. Myself, Camille, and Allie. With us today, we have special guest, Ashley Guckert. Is that how you say it? Good. Good. Okay. Welcome Ashley. [00:02:00] We'll learn more about Ashley and her story later in the show.

[00:02:03] Walk us through what we're gonna be doing today. We always spend an hour keeping you up to date on all things Airtable. We start with our round the bases, lots of news and updates since we've been gone last five weeks or so. So we'll get you caught up on that. Then a quick shout out to our sponsor, onto our, onto our backups.

[00:02:24] And then we're gonna learn about Ashley and her story and how she found herself in her current role and in the ecosystem of Airtable. And then she's gonna showcase some of her work, how to do quote processing workflows around that. And then quick highlight on our community built on air and how you can join.

[00:02:46] And then we will wrap up with Ali walking through some new functionality in Interfaces, dynamic number co coloring on that. So that will wrap up today's show. Excited for it. 

[00:03:00] [00:03:00] 

[00:03:00] Dan Fellars: So first, with our round the bases, like I mentioned, we've been gone for a while. First wanted to give a shout out to our friends at the Facebook Airtable community.

[00:03:11] They just hit their seven year mark, so congratulations to Ben and Chris and that community and so yeah, that is cool there. It's a good resource to get some help and find other like-minded people in addition to our built on air community. I'm gonna skip this one. This one actually goes towards the end.

[00:03:34] Okay, so a couple things highlights about Airtable. First, we'll start there. So they were just named part of the Top Tech 30, the 2025 Enterprise Tech 30. So that is pretty cool for Airtable in the top 30. Enterprise tech software companies to keep an eye on. So congratulations, Airtable, on [00:04:00] that one.

[00:04:01] Yeah, there's an event we were talking before the show. There's an event tomorrow if you're going to be there. It's in New York. I think it's at capacity, so it might be too late to get tickets, but if you are gonna be there, I will be there. So feel free to find me. Would love to meet you and and talk to you.

[00:04:20] And so, yeah, anybody that's gonna be in New York, let's connect. Let me know in the comments you're gonna be there. Yeah, this is also another one about it. Who else is gonna be there? Some of the speakers they also hosted an event in London, product Con, so if you went to that one, love to hear your experience there.

[00:04:44] It looks like they walked through Product Central, which I'm still. Wanting to get like a demo of, so if anybody's demoed Product Central, I'd love to get your feedback on it. On anybody. You've seen it 

[00:04:59] Kamille Parks: only at [00:05:00] the last STA table conference, but it was kind of high level. Yeah. Not too much detail at the time, but I also don't think it was released yet.

[00:05:08] It was like a launch announcement. I think so maybe there's. More information available today, but right now it seems like it's definitely a separate product from just having it like an Airtable account where you can make a workspace in all that. And it's similar, but different is the sort of summary of it all.

[00:05:33] There's a lot of things that you can display in an interface that you can't in a regular interface, but they're not, one-to-one compatible. So it's, it's, it's interesting to see this being released and I wonder how much if anything would be coming from their product Central and moving into the larger space of Airtable so that we [00:06:00] can have all those features there too.

[00:06:02] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, let us know if you were there in London for Product Con. Another one, Howie Lou, CEO was at future of Enterprise AI at few X 2025. So here's a link we'll provide in our show notes if you want to watch his presentation, talking about the future of Airtable and ai, things like that.

[00:06:31] So that is another one to keep an eye on. Here are six predictions from the for product teams from Airtable regarding AI and how product is going to change. Every company will become an AI company or risk distribution. Or risk disruption. Excuse me. Successful product leaders will own and skyrocket revenue first.

[00:06:55] Mover advantage might actually be a disadvantage. [00:07:00] Product development will be less about having the right answers and more about asking the right questions. Teams that fail to automate generalist tasks will lose expertise is critical currency in the age of ai. And teams that fail to automate winning teams will use AI to process an action.

[00:07:19] Customer feedback. There's your AI predictions for the future for product teams. Here's another one if you like the. The technical aspect of Airtable. They have an engineering blog and it looks like they had an update. They don't, they don't update this too often, but they kind of open up behind the scenes of what is going on at Airtable and how it's built.

[00:07:46] So this talks about kind of some of their data management aspect and how it works. So if you'd like to know. How Airtable is built under the hood. This is a good insight into that. 

[00:07:59] Kamille Parks: Yeah, I think [00:08:00] I might wanna take a look at this. 

[00:08:04] Dan Fellars: Yeah. I'm not familiar if Star Rock is a product or just what they call, let's see.

[00:08:10] It looks like it's a product. I'm not familiar with that one neither. But they've got their data lakes and Yeah. Kind of interesting. So very cool. All right.

[00:08:29] They also, let me bring back Ashley. She is, they also launched a new newsletter. I don't know if you saw this. So there's a new newsletter called the Airtable Effect. Great Ideas, meet powerful tools, latest launches, tips and inspiration each month. So if you wanna hear directly from them. And it looks like they might be doing interviews and things like that, so see how that turns out.

[00:08:56] But yeah, you could subscribe to their new [00:09:00] newsletter. And another one, they now have, they officially launched the AI app builder certification. So if you're looking to get more certification. I do not have this one. I should look at getting certified here. That's live. I don't know, did I don't know if Jen was involved with this one?

[00:09:20] I'll have to ask her. 

[00:09:22] I'm not sure. I would think though. Yeah. Would you be surprised if she was? 

[00:09:27] Dan Fellars: Yep. Yep. So, okay. So yeah, there's more certifications that you can get. You can now get an AI app builder certification. Going through these quickly. Okay. This is one of the big ones that came out while we were away.

[00:09:42] Airtable has a new community, so streamlined product idea submissions, new onboarding resource sections, new point system, refresh, look and feel. Let me go to it. So here is the new Airtable community. I don't know, have you spent any time [00:10:00] on it? Initial reactions. 

[00:10:03] Kamille Parks: A little. I haven't spent that much time on it.

[00:10:07] My overall feeling it's better than the last one we had, but still not. The best that we've had. I think I like the original community platform the best. But it's easier to find things I think, with this one. And it's easier to have long, complex answers with this one. So it is a step in the right direction.

[00:10:34] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it shakes out. Curious, let us know your feedback. 

[00:10:41] Kamille Parks: I will say. The point system started over, so Oh really? I am, I'm upset about that. 

[00:10:50] Dan Fellars: Really? 

[00:10:50] Kamille Parks: Yeah. Everyone's points started over so you retain any, like if you were marked as the solution on any post you, [00:11:00] you still have all those solutions.

[00:11:01] So right now my account has like a thousand badges, but no points. It's very funny.

[00:11:10] Dan Fellars: Oh man, that's, that's unfortunate for some of the, the old timers that, so it looks like you can start a new challenge. So this is your chance if you weren't involved previously, you can get involved now 

[00:11:27] Ashley Guckert: up. Yeah, it feels very, whose line is it anyways? Like, 

[00:11:33] Dan Fellars: yeah, yeah. So one way is they are accepting product feedback.

[00:11:39] Now there wasn't previously, I don't know that there was like a formal way to give product feedback. So that is a part of this. So you can submit, let's see, it says there's a submission form here and you can fill this out. And it looks like an Airtable form. 

[00:11:57] Mm-hmm. 

[00:11:58] Dan Fellars: And so so [00:12:00] yeah, so we'll see if they, if they share this, I don't know if they'll actually create like a roadmap, a public roadmap.

[00:12:07] That would be interesting. See that, yeah. That would be nice. So we'll see. We'll see what they do with the, the new features. So let us know how you are liking the, the, the community. At Airtable. Okay, moving on now, we'll talk about a few other systems out there. Some updates fill out forms. A very popular third party form just hit their 1 million form created.

[00:12:36] Congratulations to fill out. So that is cool. It's very popular. These guys are doing a lot of interesting stuff. 

[00:12:48] I move very fast. I like it. 

[00:12:50] Dan Fellars: Yep. Yep. Another one, glide Apps. They just launched an app marketplace. So this is kind of interesting. If you're an app developer wanna [00:13:00] build plugins or extensions, glide now has a marketplace that you can do that.

[00:13:07] So that's interesting. I might have to look into that for ware. 

[00:13:10] Mm-hmm. 

[00:13:13] Dan Fellars: Another one. Notion, if you're a notion fan. This is actually true. This the, the CEO Ivan ZI don't feel like I've seen much of him out there, so he doesn't, he's not very public. So he did a podcast. So if you wanna hear what notion is up to, what I thought was interesting, it piqued our interest is Airtable actually sponsors this podcast.

[00:13:35] So they were actually sponsoring, and it wasn't just Airtable, it was Product Central was sponsoring this podcast. So that was interesting, very. Yeah, so it's down here, product Central. So yeah, so if you're interested in, in Notion, we'll put a link to that one. No Loco, which is a popular third party portal [00:14:00] application now has a free tier.

[00:14:02] So they announce that the end of February. So if you wanna try out No Loco, you can now get started for free. Check that out. Okay, let's see. A friend June, he came on the, on the show last season, I believe maybe the season before. His application is, is some shortcuts for Apple for iPhone. It's now in the app store.

[00:14:29] So if you're looking to do some automations with your iPhone and Airtable. Airtable iOS, you can do that. So check that out in the App store. And one more, this was interesting. I don't recall. I'm a Zapier customer and. Maybe I got an email about this, but I didn't, I didn't realize this till I was reviewing our show notes that somebody broke into it, it's code repository and may have access customer data.[00:15:00] 

[00:15:00] So there was a data breach of Zapier. If you're a customer of them, be aware of that, but I don't. Maybe I don't read every email that I get from Zapier, but maybe they did notify us, but I don't remember getting an email about this. 

[00:15:13] I don't remember either. 

[00:15:15] Dan Fellars: Yeah, so 

[00:15:19] and I don't see it. I'm searching for it in my inbox right now.

[00:15:23] I don't see. 

[00:15:23] Dan Fellars: Interesting, 

[00:15:25] huh? Well, 

[00:15:28] Dan Fellars: it did not affect any Zapier database infrastructure, so. A subset of, so maybe it only impacted a few people. 

[00:15:36] Hmm. 

[00:15:37] Dan Fellars: Only notified those people. Interesting. Good. All right, so let's zap your, okay, so let's talk about Airtable updates. There actually has been quite a few. So we, we last left in February, we talked about this one.

[00:15:55] Interface, customization and managed app. Let's just kind of go through the list per [00:16:00] field. Editability and list view. I think we did mention this one on our last show. So you can now set per field editability on a list view and interfaces. 

[00:16:13] I love that one. 

[00:16:14] Dan Fellars: Yep. That is 

[00:16:15] hugely beneficial. 

[00:16:17] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Okay, now we're getting into some of the new ones, although this one I think we knew about it just wasn't announced.

[00:16:25] And this is what Ali's gonna be showing us later in the show. So, field level coloring for number fields and interfaces. Mm-hmm. So we'll dive deep into that later. Create new records from bulk attachment uploads. So now you can create new records in bulk in a base grid and gallery view. So is this only at the data level or can you do this in the interface?

[00:16:52] Alli Alosa: Oh, I don't actually know. I think it's at the data level. Mm-hmm. I don't know. 

[00:16:59] Dan Fellars: [00:17:00] See, 

[00:17:00] I don't know how they would do it. 

[00:17:02] Dan Fellars: This is showing, this is showing at the data level, so that would be my guess. 

[00:17:07] Alli Alosa: Yeah. I don't. I don't know how they would like elegantly implement it in interfaces. It would be a little bit different.

[00:17:16] Yeah. Mm-hmm. So 

[00:17:17] Dan Fellars: that's kind of interesting. So if you have a ton of attachments, you can drag 'em all in and it'll create one record per attachment. That's my understanding. Yeah. Yeah, 

[00:17:27] Alli Alosa: that's, and that's great. It used to be really the only way to do it would be individually drag them, or you could write a script after dragging them all into one record.

[00:17:36] You could have a script, break it out into individual ones, but 

[00:17:39] Dan Fellars: mm-hmm. 

[00:17:40] Alli Alosa: This is huge time saver. Mm-hmm. 

[00:17:44] Dan Fellars: And so now bulk upload will always create separate records for each file, which attachment field to populate. Okay. So that is kind of cool. Okay. This is an interesting one. Display external images and [00:18:00] interfaces.

[00:18:00] I know we've talked about this in the built on air community, so if you have, we might show this in a future segment, but yeah, if you have like a URL that's, that points to a, to a stored image somewhere, you can have a URL field. And put the URL there and then you can actually display the image in your interface.

[00:18:22] So that's pretty handy. 

[00:18:24] Kamille Parks: Yeah. Something I'd wanna test This photo implies that there's attachment comments enabled. Where are those stored? How are they doing that? Interesting. Wondering that as well. My understanding is that this is only an interface feature. It's not like in the base view you can, it's not a display option for the URL field, so.

[00:18:52] I'm wondering if that would've been a, a more straightforward approach if you made URL fields have two display modes, one [00:19:00] being text, and the second being as a, you know, an attachment to make it more consistent. Because from an like an API perspective and all of that, I wonder are those comments accessible or will they ever be, or all of that?

[00:19:17] Dan Fellars: I don't recall. I, I experimented with this. I don't recall there being the ability to comment on the image, but it wasn't, 

[00:19:25] Alli Alosa: it wouldn't be the first time they chose a screenshot of something that isn't actually possible to do. 

[00:19:30] Dan Fellars: Right. Yeah. That would be my guess. This is marketing purpose only, so, yeah. Okay, next one.

[00:19:43] Portals portal is now public. So we've talked about this in the past. But you can create a, a somewhat tailored login page and you can get people outside your, [00:20:00] your business. This does, let's see, what tier does this work on? 

[00:20:07] Kamille Parks: Business and team, 

[00:20:08] Dan Fellars: business and enterprise. Interesting. Hmm. So even at the team, 

[00:20:14] Kamille Parks: it's nice that it's available for team.

[00:20:15] I wouldn't have expected it to be available for team, but it is nice that it is because it's effectively what it gets you. It allows you to invite more people at a lower cost to your interfaces. The one problem I have so far is that it sounds like you can only invite an individual user like.

[00:20:37] You can only invite me to one of your portals, and as soon as you invite me to another one, I'm treated like a regular collaborator and then you pay full price. Again, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I could see a world in which you would I. Oh wait, no, that doesn't make sense either.

[00:20:54] What I was about to say. So I, I think there's a lot of times, especially on the [00:21:00] enterprise level, you would want, one particular user might have access to three different portals, and it's not always feasible to combine all of your use cases into one base, just so that this one external user can interact with all the data that they need to.

[00:21:18] Right. And you can do that today, but at a, a cost that doesn't seem right for if you're just like reviewing information and maybe clicking a couple check boxes. So I'm wondering if that restriction will ever be lifted or adjusted. But otherwise, if you have a pretty straightforward workflow where external collaborators really only need access to one set of interfaces portals might be like a good option for you.

[00:21:48] Yeah, 

[00:21:49] Alli Alosa: I think the other important thing to note is that it only works with email, email accounts that are like domain [00:22:00] specific. So you can't use a Gmail account to, like if you, if you log into Airtable with a Gmail account, you can't create a portal because they need to be able to verify that the people that you are inviting are not from your same organization.

[00:22:14] Which is another caveat. So you can only invite external users. So that means they cannot have the same domain as you when you're inviting them. 

[00:22:22] Kamille Parks: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think generally the problem is Airtable treats editors the same if you only have access to the interface versus the base, and that feels like they're missing a.

[00:22:39] Like a global separation there because the, that email difference will be more a problem at the team level, which is why I was surprised it's even available at the team level. 

[00:22:52] Dan Fellars: Mm-hmm. 

[00:22:52] Kamille Parks: My first Airtable account was all Gmail based until I finally moved everything to my, like, my business email, like [00:23:00] on a whim, not even because I needed to do so.

[00:23:03] So I just, I think that would be. I would like to see portals kind of evolve to be more like if the person you're inviting only has access to interfaces across the board mm-hmm. Well, then they, they pay this price rather than full editor price. 

[00:23:22] Alli Alosa: Absolutely. And even the pricing for portals now is just not, it's.

[00:23:26] Not great, I don't think. 

[00:23:28] Kamille Parks: Yeah, 

[00:23:29] Alli Alosa: it did not get very good reactions on LinkedIn. People were like 

[00:23:32] Kamille Parks: $7 or something per person, but $8 per person. Yeah. Well, I think it depends on if it's annual versus monthly and then but you also have to get. A minimum of 15, I think. Mm-hmm. These numbers are imprecise, but the, the point is that it's about half the cost of a regular license, but you have to have at least 15.

[00:23:59] So like if you [00:24:00] were trying to invite 10, you're still saving money, but you do feel you're paying more than what you would want to pay regardless, so, 

[00:24:09] Alli Alosa: right. 

[00:24:09] Kamille Parks: Yeah. 

[00:24:10] Alli Alosa: No, I get it. It's a tough challenge. They can't. Cannibalize themselves by, you know, making it so much cheaper that everybody decides to invite people as external collaborators rather than 

[00:24:21] mm-hmm.

[00:24:22] Alli Alosa: What they're already doing. So, I get it. It's hard. 

[00:24:26] Dan Fellars: Yeah. So yeah, check that out. Portals. You can get that now. Okay. This is one that was new to me today. Sync document content with Google Drive sync. So they've always had a third party or a, a data sync so you could sync. Files into Airtable from Google Drive.

[00:24:45] Now it will actually sync the file into an attachment field. Okay. So you can actually get the attachments. So then especially for like the AI component, that's what they talk about here, is then it could actually get access to the attachment [00:25:00] and you could, you could AI. Process the attachment. So if you have like a Google doc, it will convert it to a PDF.

[00:25:07] I'm assuming it says it, it will be converted to an appropriate file format. So A PDF or a or Word doc something like that. There is a limit a hundred megabytes per file. This will count against your attachment limits in Airtable as well, so you gotta be aware of that. But I thought that was interesting.

[00:25:27] Definitely I. My guess is they did this for the AI component to analyze those attachments. 

[00:25:35] Alli Alosa: That's exciting though. I've, I remember being frustrated years ago working with a client and it previously, all it synced in was a thumbnail and it was like teeny, teeny tiny, and it just wasn't, and then Googled made a change where you couldn't use the URL for that file to embed anymore.

[00:25:54] It like, it just didn't work. So we were. It kind of stuck, [00:26:00] but now this actually opens up a door. 

[00:26:03] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Interesting. Cool. So that's a cool one. Last one. Multi-level dropdown filtering and interface designer. New list layout pages now have a page level hierarchy, allowing users to create dropdown filters on any table within the hierarchy.

[00:26:22] I don't understand 

[00:26:24] Kamille Parks: this. Pic, this picture's misleading. So this, what we're looking at was always there. When you're editing a list in interfaces, what I think they're saying is end level, end user level filtering on the page itself. But I haven't seen that. Yeah, I haven't 

[00:26:42] Alli Alosa: either. And I don't understand the, the use of the word dropdown filter.

[00:26:46] It, it to me is extremely misleading. It's like when I think dropdown filter, I think of the actual dropdown filters that you can put on an interface page. 

[00:26:56] Mm-hmm. 

[00:26:57] Alli Alosa: This is not that. This is only a [00:27:00] backend filter. Mm-hmm. I don't understand why they just threw the word dropdown in there. Like, I got really excited when I read that.

[00:27:08] I was like, oh my gosh, can we actually show to the user dropdowns from any level of that table? That would be so cool. Mm-hmm. I, I don't know. 

[00:27:19] Kamille Parks: Yeah, I'm feeling I was, I was waiting for more time to pass. I saw this like up here on the What's New page and I was like, well, surely after some time I'll understand what it is.

[00:27:30] Nope. 

[00:27:33] I mean, 

[00:27:35] Alli Alosa: yeah. I don't even see it as a front end option either. Like, I'm very confused. 

[00:27:43] Dan Fellars: Yeah. So maybe there's more to come here. All right. I'm gonna do for, for time's sake, I think I'm going to hold off on these. We, we could review 'em next week. So yeah, we got through all the product updates [00:28:00] and news and updates on everything.

[00:28:02] So more to come. It's been a busy month and next week we'll catch up on some of these others we didn't get to today. So with that, 

[00:28:09] let's move on onto air. If you are storing your data in. Airtable, it's best practice to have it stored outside as well. That's where OnAir backups comes in. Keeps your data in sync with Box Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive, and also backs up your schema information.

[00:28:29] So check it out onto air.com. You can use promo code built on air for a discount and start backing up your data today from Airtable. You can also restore back into Airtable as well, and. 

[00:28:44] Okay, let's learn a little bit about Ashley. Put you up on the big one. There you go. 

[00:28:54] Kamille Parks: Hello, Ashley. How you doing? Good.

[00:28:56] Thank you so much for inviting me. Of [00:29:00] course. So typically we start with the age old question. When did you start using Airtable? 

[00:29:07] Ashley Guckert: I started using Airtable when I was working at Conde Nast as a post-production manager in 2017. Hmm. So yeah. 

[00:29:20] Kamille Parks: It's quite some time. So right now I'm using Airtable in the sort of media space as well.

[00:29:26] So always interesting for me to hear how other people are using Airtable for like media and content creation and things like that, 

[00:29:35] Ashley Guckert: that that is exactly how I learned most of Airtable. And then. What I am really good at and why I keep getting hired is being able to take very complex production systems that are making content for many, many, many brands and many, many content creators, and create a system that is able to streamline and track the progress of projection [00:30:00] and then the progress of distribution for social content broadcast and streaming.

[00:30:08] But that's how I got into Airtable. 

[00:30:11] Kamille Parks: When you were first using it, was it something like you started working and people were in a different system and you're like, eh, this doesn't, things are all over the place. Or were they already using Airtable and you were like, oh, this is actually something I can get used to.

[00:30:28] Ashley Guckert: Yeah, shout out to Shane Hoffman, who is the creator of Conde Nast's massive Airtable system. I, he didn't teach me necessarily, but his system that he built is what I used and I just really liked it. It, it's clicked really well in my brain. Mm-hmm. So was 

[00:30:52] Kamille Parks: it something like, were, were you there, I guess, at the time where it was already like a full fledged system or was, was stuff still [00:31:00] changing while like you were first getting started?

[00:31:03] Because Airtable, as you know, is very flexible and that tends to lead to like a project being built and then iterated over time. 

[00:31:12] Ashley Guckert: For sure. It, it every media company uses a different content management system for the production team to say they've got a pitch for a. A video or they've got a publicity run with a couple movies that are being promoted.

[00:31:27] And Airtable was created to track the deliverables. So it's always. It was always growing and being iterated upon as the CMS that they were using was lacking or getting updated and not really working. And the API connections needed to not only receive that information from the CMS, but also receive the information from the distribution sources.

[00:31:54] So like, what does the engagement numbers look like? How many likes, how many views? And that [00:32:00] is just an ever changing constant. Increase, hopefully. And as those numbers go up and multiple teams were all using Airtable. So this base, this, it was such a huge, huge, huge, huge base of multiple bases. And every year or so, we needed to archive a base because we've reached a limit.

[00:32:21] And then the 2020 base was built. 2021 base. Yeah. 

[00:32:28] Kamille Parks: So 2017 is before a lot of like major features for Airtable were. Created. So that's, if I'm not mistaken, that's definitely before interfaces. It's before syncing as like a real thing. Versus like hacky solutions. We all had to do, I think it might be before extensions.

[00:32:50] So you've seen quite a bit of change. From the, when you started with Airtable to what Airtable can do today, what do you [00:33:00] think has been your favorite sort of addition or thing that was like the most, most game changer like thing to help organize so many like systems all in one place? 

[00:33:13] Ashley Guckert: When I first started using it, it only a few people could fully understand.

[00:33:18] What Airtable, how to use it, its functionality and its capabilities and just the magic of like what we could do with it. Because there, everyone has a different brain and I'm looking at the, my screen, 'cause Airtable is to my left. There's only so many people who step into a table and are like, okay, yeah, I get this.

[00:33:38] And there's some people who are like completely overwhelmed. Interfaces, I would say were, was the biggest game changer. Hmm. Just being able to limit the amount of information someone sees and give them a very clear place of, enter this information right here, and then everything else will magically happen.

[00:33:58] Being able to hide the [00:34:00] sausage, I. Creation process is important. 

[00:34:03] Kamille Parks: Yeah, I think I would probably have to agree, especially now that I am in kind of an enterprise environment where, like you're saying before I was working with teams of like five or so people, and it's easier to explain to five or so people, here's your grid view, like this is the most important view.

[00:34:22] This one helps. With notifications and and whatnot. When you have that many people, it's much easier to say, go to this page, and you know how this page has three things on it. Fill in those three things and you're good. Yeah, 

[00:34:36] Ashley Guckert: basically. And it, it just, it starts to, the people who are can become experts or are experts at Airtable start to become like a little bit of a superhero 'cause no one knows what's happening in the backend for what we built this interface to do.

[00:34:52] Yeah. That's a cool little badge to wear. 

[00:34:54] Kamille Parks: It. Is it? I think it's always fun to when you. Finally really [00:35:00] get something, like you said, when something clicks, you're like, ah, I can do anything now. And building an Airtable sometimes it's, it often gives me that feeling 

[00:35:08] Ashley Guckert: that dopamine hit. 

[00:35:09] Kamille Parks: Absolutely.

[00:35:10] Yeah. I can build anything. Yeah. So speaking of building anything you have a base that you are gonna show to us? I do, 

[00:35:22] Ashley Guckert: Pivoting. I could try to share my screen. And like I wanna give the context that this has nothing to do with media, actually. Yeah. This was a distinct pleasure that I am so honored I got to work on.

[00:35:38] I built what basically something what qual Qualtrics could sort of kind of do, but Airtable, it was so much better for the, its ability to have linked relationships. Mm-hmm. Let's see if I can share my screen.

[00:35:56] Yes. 

[00:35:58] Dan Fellars: Yeah.[00:36:00] 

[00:36:05] Oh, hold on. I got, hmm. They changed it. Okay, now you're live. 

[00:36:10] Ashley Guckert: Okay. Awesome. So I do wanna give a little context about the research study I, and, and the making or what it was testing. 'cause that context is gonna help understand how I built the base. So Tom, er. Develop worked with Tim Shriver and Tammy Piper to develop the Dignity Index, which is a way of scoring speech on a eight point index scale.

[00:36:37] Speech is scored from contempt to dignity, so one is the most contemptuous you can be feeling justified in. Calling for the violence or the death of someone else, and you rise up the scale closer and closer to dignity. So two is those people are evil and they're going to ruin us. That them three is, those are bad [00:37:00] people.

[00:37:00] They've got terrible character. It's us. Verse them four is that beginning point of separation. You know those people over there, they're just different. Five is when you start speaking with dignity. You are sticking just with facts, action and outcomes. You're not put extending your hand over to find commonality like you are at the level six.

[00:37:23] At level seven, you are willing to admit that you could be wrong and you're really looking to find that common value. And eight is the highest form of dignity where you are defending the dignity of someone. Your side is demonizing even. So we conducted a study over the course of the 2024 election every week, 80.

[00:37:49] Panelists and this table was where I collected all of the information about the panelists, their and different demographic information, their [00:38:00] political leanings we used more in commons way of, and understanding a political leaning based on their hidden tribes segmentation. That was how we based all of our understanding of.

[00:38:14] If a liberal or a conservative felt one way or another about a passage, so I, every week we had a team of college students submitting something that was said in the news lately by a politician, by a public figure that could be scored on the Dignity Index. That was collected via an forms for inter Airtable interface.

[00:38:41] A very simple form of just collect the metadata and tell me where it came from, who said it? What's the URL link? Then every top of the week, I met with my colleagues and we went through every. PA quote or passage is how we like to call it to review. If [00:39:00] this one was Scoreable two was something that we wanted to provide our panelists for review.

[00:39:06] As we talked, we also gave a guess of what we thought it would be scored as and assigned it to the week. So here you see all the work we did selecting a specific passage. For the panelists to review. They never reviewed more than eight. It was usually between six and eight and also always as bipartisan as possible.

[00:39:29] So as many conservatives speaking with dignity as liberals, speaking with dignity, then I used fill out which love, blah, love their program. To pull the information from that Airtable record with the passage to present to the panelists in this specific form. They got to see the passage who said it, the context of what they said, [00:40:00] and chose a score level.

[00:40:03] This was one of my favorite parts is our Tom spent the time writing the qualities of each score level, and I put all of those qualities into Airtable for the panelists to do a text-based matching approach. So from within this passage here, which quality on the scale matches it, and that helped the panelists determine what score and it.

[00:40:29] Created some really really rich data, qualitative and quantitative data to understand how our panelists were reading and understanding a passage so they could choose anything. It didn't have to be the exact number. In fact, I wanted that. Then they had to pace the part of the passage that matched that quality, and then the, there was open-ended feedback and open also Unrequired.

[00:40:55] How much time did it take to complete a huge success of the [00:41:00] research study was that I. Though the feedback was not required, over 50% of all scores received feedback and the panelists were telling me life stories even, and opinions on who the speaker was and how they were surprised they spoke with dignity.

[00:41:17] It, it's really, really rich, this data we collected. Okay, so. The panelists had about 48 hours to submit all their scores. After they submitted scores, we would analyze and review them. So I built an interface that facilitates that analyzing something like this. So this Mike Johnson quote here, we got to see, oh, this one's interesting.

[00:41:45] So the panelists. Each of these is a score level. The colors you can assume are the red is conservative, blue is liberal. Purple is moderate. Gray is someone who doesn't have a [00:42:00] political affiliation. They aren't not really politically leaning in any capacity. So here we see the panelists almost. Had a, a bimodal score of five and seven a couple over here, eight.

[00:42:18] And you see that it's not really leaning, like very slightly leaning liberals choosing a contempt score of four or three. But after doing this study, I can say like the winning and top line is 92% of all the scores. Agreed on dignity or contempt broadly. So that means that conservatives and liberals can agree, which is fabulous.

[00:42:43] And then this is what I meant about the the richness of the data. So though we have a bimodal score of these fives and these seven, you see here that more panelists agreed on the quality. I'm willing to take criticism from my own side and can take the pain of being criticized, [00:43:00] making me kind of assess that the.

[00:43:03] The panelists who scored at a five weren't really sure how to, what quality to give it. They weren't really sure about their score. While those that shows a seven were like, it is clearly this quality. I broke out, like if I wanted to compare the conservatives and the liberals and if I just wanted to be able to see the moderates over here and then the rich, rich con feedback data, I can step in and really zone in on what one person said.

[00:43:34] And I've limited this so you can't see any of their. Demographics, but I would, I have a notable score and then I also had an outlier score box that I would keep track of someone who was on the extreme side of the other scale, other side of the scale. So, yeah, there's so many other parts of this.

[00:43:52] 'cause it's now just not only the base we did the research in, but also the team's [00:44:00] database of passages that they use in presentations when they're speaking. We developed a daily Dignity game where you can score passages yourself, and that's, this is also the repository where I keep all that data and where the team schedules it out.

[00:44:17] For the game. But yeah, that's just, this is what I felt. 

[00:44:22] Alli Alosa: This is so cool. Yeah. Right. 

[00:44:25] Kamille Parks: Yeah, it's a pretty impressive dashboard. Airtable, don't get rid of the blinking out. 

[00:44:32] Ashley Guckert: Oh God, please don't. No. 

[00:44:35] Kamille Parks: There, there are certain things, certain aspects of like the newer layouts that are great, but there's not really a replacement quite yet for the blank layout, which is what we were just looking at where you could have information being pulled from multiple sources right next to each other rather than forced to kind of be on top and then drilling into one record, right?

[00:44:57] We're looking at one passage and then all of the data [00:45:00] related to it. And have that affect everything on the page rather than just, you know, the, whatever group you're currently looking at. So a very impressive, I think, layout. It all seemed to make sense to me. Like on first glance of not having ever seen this information before, it seemed very intuitive of like, yeah, these are the, the metrics I would suspect I would wanna look at based on, you know, the content that was collected.

[00:45:29] Ashley Guckert: Something too about the way Qualtrics works that was not gonna work for analyzing this data is the information would all be on one row and then just keep going and going and going and going, going. 

[00:45:46] Dan Fellars: Yeah. 

[00:45:46] Ashley Guckert: And as I was talking with the Qualtrics team, my mind was kind getting a headache, thinking like, how then can I.

[00:45:56] Pull all the information together for every [00:46:00] conservative that spoke at a score level of two and all of the conservative panelists that were scoring that there would be no way without the linked relationships that Airtable provides. So a lot cheaper. 

[00:46:17] Alli Alosa: I love that. Have you published that data anywhere?

[00:46:19] Like I would love to just like look at it. I think it's so cool. It is 

[00:46:23] Ashley Guckert: fascinating. 

[00:46:24] I, yeah, I've published loose analysis on the Dignity Indexes website, the National Assistance Panel, which I can link out to, but I am working with both University of Utah and the Kim Gardner Institute to on one White Paper and Berkeley on another white paper about the data I collected.

[00:46:45] Yeah, so. Very, very 

[00:46:48] Dan Fellars: cool. Very cool. Ashley. And and is this your full-time or are you a consultant? Are you open or what's your situation now? 

[00:46:59] Ashley Guckert: I [00:47:00] consult for the Dignity Index and I am full-time at the News Revenue Hub developing their advertising network, where also another big Airtable project.

[00:47:12] All these local and nonprofit national news organizations, setting them up with advertising. Advertising at a level of corporate sustainability. So if your team doesn't have ad units yet in your website or in your newsletters, we're able to provide that. So that's a huge air table project too.

[00:47:35] Dan Fellars: Very cool. Awesome. Thank you for showing that. Let's move on. If you are not in our community, there's amazing people in there, like Ashley and all of us. Join [email protected] slash join. That will get you into our free community. Sign up for our newsletter. Also be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so we would love to meet you, and if you wanna [00:48:00] be a guest on our show, we'd love to have you on as well.

[00:48:02] So join [email protected]. With that, let's end with interfaces. One of the new features of number coloring with Allie. I gotta, they changed how they do this. There we go. 

[00:48:17] Alli Alosa: Awesome. Alright. This is a feature I'm super excited about and it's been requested since day one. Like before, interfaces were a thing as well.

[00:48:29] It. It's great. It's not as great as I think it could be, but it just was released and I'm sure they will make changes and improvements as they go, or I hope. So what we can do is in interfaces only, so not in the data layer, but you can in a list view or a grid view only. And only for number fields.

[00:48:59] Lots of [00:49:00] caveats here. You can change the color that that number is displayed as. And there's a few different caveats, like I just said, and also some differences between the list and the grid. So let's start with the list. If you click on your list. And go into your little side panel here to configure it.

[00:49:24] Under the appearance section, you're gonna see a new option here called Field text Color. If we open that up, and I've got multiple layers of hierarchy in my list view, so you you know, pay attention to what level you're on here, you can change that as well and set it for all of them. So let's start with months, which is gonna be just the smallest level there.

[00:49:49] I'm gonna click add field, and you'll notice it only gives me the numbers as available options here. So let's go with percent change here. So this is a, [00:50:00] basically, I demoed this base before we went on our last season break, where we've got, like a delta being calculated between this month and the month that came the year prior.

[00:50:12] So December, 2024 versus December, 2023. If we want to, we can pick that field for change and then I. Hit the little gear, and you'll be very familiar with this color screen. I'm sure it's very similar to what you see in, you know, when you're using the coloring for conditions for any layout in the data layer.

[00:50:33] As well as like progress bars all sorts of other things. But we really only have one option, which is, it's, you can say where the, the field you chose is. Any numerical operator here, so equal to, not equal to, less than, greater than et cetera. And then you have to enter a static value. So if we wanna say, you know, the [00:51:00] change is greater than 0% and I want that to be green then I could duplicate that.

[00:51:09] And then in, I could say, if it's less than 0%, I want it to be red. And you can see that's only happening on that month's level there. And then you could also set a default color, which in my case I would actually want it to be just black if it were 0%. So I'm not gonna set a default 'cause it's already black, because I could then go through and apply that same thing to all my levels and do some things around that.

[00:51:35] But pretty cool. I am happy with that, but what, what I really think is missing is like a, the ability to apply conditions to any field, not just numbers. And I would love to be able to say, you know, color percent change where any of these conditions are true, not just the number is less than or greater than a [00:52:00] static value.

[00:52:00] I would love to be like, you know, if. This value says down, I want this to be read, or whatever it might be. I think that would make it a lot more flexible. 

[00:52:10] Mm-hmm. 

[00:52:12] Alli Alosa: So missing that, I think. But there, 

[00:52:14] Kamille Parks: and there are, there is precedent elsewhere in the product for that, you know? Right. There's lookups roll-ups and counts have like the conditional filtering apply that's analogous to color by, up or down.

[00:52:28] And then why not color? About any field I could see not coloring a, an attachment field, it's always attachment as the, the exception to the rule. I could see lookups, lookups are fairly complicated. I could see not being able to color those. Mm-hmm. Although I would like it. I can understand why not, but the other ones why not plain text I can't do is empty.

[00:52:52] Exactly. Come on now. 

[00:52:54] Alli Alosa: Like it's silly. And I'm like, I would love to be able to say like, okay, if it's. [00:53:00] If it's greater than zero and also greater than this other field over here that's hidden, like mm-hmm. Or like be able to compare it to something, to like, instead of just entering in a static value, like my goals might change year over year, and I'd want it to only be green if it's above a certain number for just that month or whatever it is.

[00:53:22] There's a lot more flexibility that I think could be added. But I'm still excited. Super cool to be able to do that and then to show an even cooler thing. Well, I don't know about even cooler, but there's something I do really like about the list. I mean the grid options. Let's throw in a grid. If I go change this 

[00:53:50] and I want to show a grid.

[00:53:57] Alli Alosa: Now if we add, I just hate [00:54:00] the way the grid looks like so many things I like about the grid, like I want, I, I love the summary bar and I wanna be able to put that in list layouts, but I digress. The coloring in grid layouts actually colors the entire cell, which I find very nice. But it's kind of weird that they limit the colors and I mean, I don't know.

[00:54:24] Kamille Parks: But yeah, I also, is that the full list of colors even like full of hues? I think it's not, it's, it's 

[00:54:33] Alli Alosa: definitely weird. There's, there's chosen different colors allowed in different places, and I don't.

[00:54:42] Ashley Guckert: Yes. 

[00:54:44] Kamille Parks: We, I think we've said before, maybe not on the show, but certainly in Slack, that whenever Air table releases a new feature, it's 80% done and then mm-hmm. Then they just start free styling afterwards. 

[00:54:58] Alli Alosa: Exactly. Right. [00:55:00] It's like, I like, I like this, but I would love to be able to say, you know, you had mentioned outliers in your.

[00:55:09] Presentation before this. I would love to be like, only highlight the outliers and that you can only really figure out if it's an outlier, if you have a formulaic option or like you've checked a box. Like if this box is checked, make this red. Like I would love to be able to do that. Yeah, but still it's a step in the right direction and I'm excited about it.

[00:55:30] I think this looks very nice. 

[00:55:32] Dan Fellars: Yeah, I mean that feature there like. People wanted that on the data layer from day one, you know? 'cause that's very common in in Excel. 

[00:55:43] Alli Alosa: Exactly. Yeah. Conditional coloring. 

[00:55:47] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:55:48] Alli Alosa: Yes. 

[00:55:49] Dan Fellars: Interesting. Cool. Yeah. Thank you. 

[00:55:54] Of course. 

[00:55:55] Dan Fellars: Awesome. Well that concludes today's [00:56:00] show, Ashley.

[00:56:01] Thank you for joining us. If people wanna connect with you, is there an easy way to to reach out to you? 

[00:56:08] Ashley Guckert: LinkedIn. That's the only place you'll find. 

[00:56:09] Dan Fellars: Okay. We'll get an update from you down the road and see what you're up to. So thank you for coming on, and thank you all for joining. We'll be back for episode two next week.

[00:56:21] See you all then. Take care. 

[00:56:22] Thank you.

[00:56:40] Thank you for joining today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to check out our sponsor, OnAir Backups, automated backups for Airtable. We'll see you next time on the Built On Air Podcast.