Build a flexible interface directly in Airtable: Interfaces Demo.

hello we are here to talk about airtable's brand new interfaces feature i'm super excited about this i'm sure you are too if you are like me um you are an air table user for so many parts of your life and and work and this interface feature is amazing so in this video i'm gonna briefly talk about what interfaces what is it what is interfaces uh we'll have a little demo i'm gonna build a little sample interface and we're gonna talk about what interfaces doesn't do right now so it does a lot of things there are a few things it doesn't do but overall it is amazing feature i've been able to dive in and play with a little bit so i hope this video is useful to you so let's jump in so in the beginning if you're anything like me when you first saw air table you saw what looked to be excel uh maybe an excel killer depending on how you feel about it but it was very grid-like excel excel like excelli if that's a word and but there were some differences because it's a database so there was linking fields and columns and things like that air table advanced it they created different view types you could have grid view to look at your data you could have a form view you could have a calendar view you could create a gallery of your of your data you could have a kanban view timeline gantt chart amazing so as you begin to use air table there are some challenges when you use air table and you have other people using your air table everybody gets access to all of the tables and columns in your base as of right now there isn't any permissions i can't give someone access to three out of the six columns in this air table i have to give them access to everything it's kind of all or nothing proposition you could uh hide some things with views and columns hidden and you could do some trickery but all in all everyone has it has access to your database and they can duplicate it copy it do whatever they need to do that's one problem another problem is that um when people are using the base itself depending on what you need to do data input can be a chore so if you have a grid view or any view and you've got like 20 or 30 columns you have data you need to see to make decisions on other columns it gets a little bit cumbersome swapping between views and scrolling left to right to find the right columns and it's just a very spreadsheet thing right so what was holding airtable back from say being an asana or i mean almost any sas product there are so many of them that you could emulate an air table but if you can't get over the way you're consuming and utilizing the data um you would maybe fall back to one of those tools right so asana i think i did an exercise and you know sun is probably advanced more advanced now but previously you could build the sauna pretty much in air table with the help of a tool like integra man or something like that if you could digest the view and the grid and table structure otherwise ex air table is just a big block block oh box of legos that's what i like to call it it's a lot of legos you can build stuff with so that's what you used to have in the past so what happened after people went from um a view like this where they get to experience air table and you know there's view permissions you had companies that would build interfaces on top of airtable to solve some of that problem so tools like stacker would use airtable as its primary database and you could build more crm-based dashboard e-based interfaces on top of that air table data and you could invite people via permissions to access that data pretty nifty tool um there are some pros and cons to tools like this they don't sync right away um it's not real-time data it's not native um depending on what you do it can be like a very expensive cost but you know these companies grow doing that now airtable introduces interfaces which is taking the place of what a lot of these utilities used to do so now i can create my own uh consumable interface view where i can read and edit and manipulate data native in air table real time and i can invite people just to see and access my interfaces without them accessing the underlying air table database amazing so that is what airtable interfaces is it's almost like um a combination of gridview i think there's some kanban there might be some can kanban and some chart views but it's like a combination of all that stuff just on one page or one view so we'll jump in and we'll kind of explore it a little bit so when i was playing around with it um what i wanted to do was kind of understand like a like a common use case so i'm just going to add a base here i'm going to start with a template and i'm going to use content calendar just as an example so we're just going to create a brand new content calendar i'm going to use this template and this will be the template for my underlying interfaces so your interface is attached to a base all right so i've got my content pipeline the workflow is pretty simple you have a concept of you have a concept of a content pipeline this is kind of where people are posting content and you can kind of say the channels the content is going to go on the due date some of the data and people kind of manage like a social media calendar if you will there's also campaigns and then they have the concept of results so let's just say that as part of the content pipeline you want to create a view for your manager to review content and approve it for final for final you know thumbs up or whatever we might create in the old days we might create a checkbox and we might say approve and here's your check box and then the manager would log into air table and just look through these records and basically approve them right they might have a view be a little bit more fancy than this they might have a view for content that needs approval they kind of approve the content that way so with interfaces we can build an interface for them to do their approval process so i'm just going to click on interfaces here i'm going to click on start building i'm going to call this content approval actually i'm going to call it content management i'll show you why in a second basically in interfaces i have an interface called content management and i can basically have different pages or views to this interface project um so right now i'm gonna and there's different layouts i will tell you briefly about them you've got a record review layout which basically has this little left sidebar this little left nav where your records appear and as you click through the records the things on the right side dynamically change based on the record that you selected so that's kind of like the record review you have a dashboard which is kind of like a bunch of components and widgets you're dragging on the page and then every component or widget you're defining the table and view that it's assigned to you've got record summary where you select a table with records and as you select the record it allows you to have like a little bit of a summary information to kind of cycle through and then you have blank canvas blank canvas you can create all of these except for record review i couldn't find a way to create that record review left side nav workflow but i could create everything else so we're going to start with record review so i'm going to click on next um you can you choose a table that is gonna host your data that's gonna permanently sit on the left hand side so we're gonna choose content pipeline um you can copy the data options from a view like it'll copy like your filters and stuff um i'm not going to do that right now i'm just going to say next pick elements allows us to pick elements this part is a little bit of a bummer because um i can't search so if you have like a table with like a bunch of columns it's not really easy to like search and and click through all these so i'm just going to click next and here's my page i'm going to call this um approval pipeline and i'm going to click finish all right so here is my basic interface right away if i just click preview this is showing me exactly what this interface would look like so if someone clicked and i shared it with of the manager they would just cycle through and kind of see see this content but what i'm going to do we're going to make that approval pipeline so first thing i'm going to do is on this left hand you know this little pop out you can add elements so i can add elements to the right hand side and like this grid if you add the all elements it's kind of like you can pretty much add anything you can add random text you can add a divider as you click and hold it kind of ask you where you want to move data once you move it as well you can kind of like resize it a little bit and you get access to um you know some some text effects and whatnot i'm going to delete this you can also add grids which is a really interesting feature so let's say um part of my content pipeline approval workflow i just want to have a random grid at the bottom of of data attached to and well once you select the grid you can have this properties box for the data i could say i wanted to be related to results for whatever reason and it's going to just show me a results table just here it's not doing anything but it's just a results table that i can have so as i cycle through maybe i want to like look at results maybe i want to click in a record have that pop out so you could have a results table or whatever table you want um for our workflow we want a check box for the approval pipeline so we could add we're going to go to record lists when you click on this here this basically is means whatever record you select here this is a dynamic element that will change on the screen this second option so if i say approve i'm just going to grab approve and i'm going to grab creator right so notice now that i did that as i cycle through the creators change based on what i selected now i can also edit these fields so if i click on this i can say this is editable i could say this is edible editable and i could say all these are editable so you can kind of create this experience where you can in real time click and edit these fields or maybe you can only edit some fields um these are pretty flexible too so you know you could have due date here and maybe i have i don't know if there's another date in here or whatever i'll grab status you could have status here you could kind of swap you know move between these two anything that has like these little dotted these little dotted dashes as grid components you can like color a different color so i could like you know bring some stuff out as important or whatnot you can click and there's some other options like if you want to label or not what size you want it to be all of these have those those basic features of editable and what size you want it to be now the one thing that is a little bit missing is your buttons so i i really fell in love with the button feature in air table and being able to like trigger events and stuff you can add buttons to the views but their only clickable buttons are ones that aren't based on scripts so if i go back to go back to base and if i have two buttons script button i'm going to make this a button and i'm just going to say this is going to run a script of which i don't even have one right so there's my hello world one script button where i can click it and you know a little pop-up will come and run the script if i duplicate this and have a um we're going to have a url open we'll call it a url button that makes more sense so if we have a url button that says open url if i go back to my interface so right here i'm going to add those buttons i just added we got the script button i'm going to drag right here and we have the url button and i'm going to drag right here so sad to say my script button if i go into preview mode it's unclickable i can't open my url button because it just opens up the url on my other screen but my script button right now can't be opened this is beta i hope this changes in the future that would make this amazing you could have a whole dashboard of like like a control panel just so many cool things you could do anyways that's kind of like the buttons but otherwise like the drop downs work text fields work on the other options and data types appear to work due date right brings up a little cool little calendar so and then you can cycle through attachments if you have an image if there was attachments here you could cycle through those so that is what it does so let's just add our for our content pipeline we wanted to have a manager approve something so in this little header i'm going to add a check box this as a header there's certain things you can't add in here i noticed let's add a the approved check box um fields and headers cannot be edited so we can't add a checkbox there we can add text there but not something edited which would be awesome so we're going to make this editable here and then actually um yeah whatever so for this example we'll just have a proof here so what we'll also say is oh there's one other thing i want to do to mention you can change the label here so if i change this label to social media picture you can see social media picture there but it doesn't change the underlying label here so it kind of works similar as uh forms in air table forms you can change like the you can create like temporary labels for stuff so it kind of works the same way um so anyways you can so all of these properties you can change headlines you could even like like we said before you could add we like i said i'm all alone here you could add a paragraph of text maybe like some instructions to someone before they're actioning on some of this stuff you can have this same component multiple times like i have two approves but we don't want that so in this content pipeline i want these records to fall off my hit list after they're approved so i would go to content pipeline and the properties toolbar comes up and i'm going to create a filter here where um [Music] approve is unchecked yeah that's what i want so now if i were to preview this this is my workflow if i'm approving items see they're dropping off the list like all right i'm gonna do this one it doesn't actually disappear from here but at least it comes off the list so you kind of have a hit list of you could have like daily work that you got to do and do some work and mark it as complete or something and then it kind of falls off your list so you can create like a nice little um kit list workflow so um that is interfaces as it stands right now there are some things that would make interfaces really awesome so you can add um things like charts and stuff like that so i can add like a um a chart and i could say this is going to be a you know a pie chart and this pie chart is going to be content pipeline and this is going to be we'll make it a pie chart you can have the categories if you want it to be status or whatever the category is values labels legends you can kind of like build charts if you want like some sort of dashboard view you can kind of just build a bunch of components like that call it a dashboard you don't even have to have the sidebar obviously for the dashboard type views you can also add in these numbers which are pretty slick i really wish that um i could put any arbitrary data in like in like a cool little box like this though because it only allows you to do numbers that are attached like a record or something so it's like a record count or like a field in your column that um is like countable but it doesn't just allow you to if you have a number in a table and the number is like orders for the week or something and it's not like a roll up of something you you can't just add the field of whatever that value is not this way um so you could add it as text but you don't get the cool like little background the headlines you know with the appearance or whatever so i thought that was that was kind of cool and you can't do that there are some advanced things you can do with filtering where you can create a filter and you can select multiple sources for this filter and and and let's say you had two grids on the on the uh on your interface you could filter both grids at the same time by adding um filters you can connect like multiple things which is pretty interesting and you could say filter by conditions and then as you're typing stuff in here this data will change so this data here changed and this abstract data changed based on there being s's in the name so you could literally create a filter to change like all your data at once which is pretty cool one thing i thought would be really awesome is a filter that's dynamic based on data from multiple grid so it would be really cool if i could add a variable for a filter value here from something i clicked so maybe i have a filter tied to like one table maybe this is like a a grid view or something and elements grid view maybe it's a grid of content well that's limited a grid of results maybe and maybe i want to filter something in here maybe i want to even filter it from here right like maybe i want this grid to filter based on something i'm selecting here that would be sweet but i'd have to have the ability to say to add like a dynamic variable from some other component on the page so that would be cool um as it stands right now you can't add anything else to these interfaces so you can't add widgets you can't add like uh you can't have like a little mini kanban experience in here you can't have calendar views view components or anything like that that would be super awesome um but i wouldn't hold your breath um airtable did an amazing job on this i'm sure they will add to the functionality of this the pricing for this has not been set yet so this is something that as you build your dashboards it'll be free for now um when i publish this by the way i can share it with with people and basically to get access to it when you go to your base now you have like a little interfaces section and here's an interface so i think it's a it's an amazing feature oh i forgot to mention that once i create kind of like my interface component i can create a bunch of different views for that so not just one view i can create a bunch of different really cool views and they can all kind of exist underneath that so it's almost like you could create like a content management interface group or i guess interface and these are just views and you can just invite someone to the content management and then they can you know get access to these cool to these cool views so um and then you can obviously share it with people um but anyways you can share it with people and then it'll tell you the connected base but they get access to the interface so anyways that is um interfaces this is pretty brief and it's only been out for a day so i haven't had a ton of time to play with it um i do have a couple really important use cases that i could see immediate value for this so i'm really interested to to see what you guys think of the feature um if you have any questions or what you plan on building leave it in the comments below but otherwise that's it for the video i hope you enjoyed it

Channel: Build Faster

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Id: 5GaxcwAvFng

Length: 27min 7sec (1627 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021