What's up YouTube. I am about to break all of my rules
for creating videos on this channel and it's for a good cause.
Because today moments ago, I found out that air table
launched its Interface. This is a highly anticipated new feature
that has been whispered about for months, if not years, and without any
warning, it just launched right now. So yes, it's 11:00 PM.
I've worked a full day, but we're recording this video and editing
it as soon as possible to get it out so that we can all learn
about the Interface together. So if that's of interest stick
around and let's get into it, I need a coffee. Welcome back to the
channel. If you're new here, my name is Gareth Pronovost and I
own a company called GAP Consulting. It's mission is to help you to
organize an automate your business. And work-life using no code tools and
air table is at the core of what we do. And as I mentioned in the intro here, air table has just pushed
out an amazing new feature. That's going to show us how to
leverage interfaces inside of our database. And this is a
huge new release. Now, before we get into the heart of the video, I want to invite you to join me for
my upcoming live webinar. Once a week, I hop onto a webinar and I present
the basic building blocks of using no code automation in conjunction
with tools like air table. So if that's of interest and you want
to learn how to leverage automation to save up to 20 hours per week without
writing a single line of code, definitely check out my upcoming training
at Gareth Pronovost dot com slash webinar dash registration. I'm sure
we all have a lot of questions. So let's hop on into exactly what I'm
going to be covering in this video. First and foremost, I want to talk about what plans
are currently allowing the new Interface within air table. So we're going to take a look at what
plan you have to be on in order to get access to this. And I'm also going to drop some hints
as to what I think might be the case in the future. From there, we're going to take a quick look at how
to create an Interface and I'll be going through just a simple database and how
you can put together an Interface for your team on that. And then lastly, we're going to talk about what this
means for our favorite tools that we've already started embracing and probably
fallen in love with, by this point, I'm talking about many extensions
stacker and of course softer. So what does this mean? These interfaces in air table and
how is that going to impact the whole community and subsequent tools that
have been built around the air table ecosystem? So let's jump into
part one. What is included, what plan do you have to be on in
order to get air table interfaces? I was really surprised by the answer
here, check out the air table pricing, scroll on down, and you will find that Interface
Designer is currently available with any pricing tier, including the free plan. I'm blown away by this, but this comes with a caveat that
caveat being when you're in air table, if you're looking at
the interface Designer, you will see that during beta, you will get the ability to create
unlimited interfaces, access, all Interface, design features and share
interfaces with your entire team. But at the bottom, you should notice that it says Interface
Designer will be in beta until early 20, 22. And after the beta ends, your workspace will retain access to any
interfaces you build during the beta, regardless of your air
table plan. And to me, this is an indication that air table
thinks that interfaces are not going to be available on all plans. Moving
forward into the future. Of course, this is a massive new feature
that they've released. And so they're probably looking to
get us all very excited about it, and they want to launch it out to
everyone just as they did with scripts. If you recall, when
scripts first came out, it was made available to everyone
and over time they pulled back on that and now scripts are just
available to that pro plan. So don't be surprised if in the future
interfaces are no longer available at all paid tiers. But as of this
recording, as of Interface, Designer, just being launched is available
to every air table plan. Let's now jump into an actual example
and take a look at how this all works. But first of course, we have to
start with the data structure. I'm keeping it super simple so we can
get to the good stuff in my database. I have clients just to name a phone
number and those clients connect the projects in my projects table.
I have a name of the project. It relates to a client project, has a
start date and tasks associated with it. Now, lastly, those tasks you'll see,
we have them grouped by project here. This is the project link. There's a
person in charge. I've got a start date, I've got an end date and I
have a completed checkbox, whether that task is done or not. Of
course each task also has its own name, really straightforward, practical
for many, many businesses, because a lot of us have clients
projects and tasks that are associated with all the work we do. So
let's jump into interfaces. The first place you need to head
is in the upper left corner. Check on that Interface as button. Now I've already started creating an
Interface here just to kind of test it out just before recording.
Haven't gotten very far. So let's go ahead and create
a new one. And by the way, if you want to see where I had that
pop up from earlier, check it out, click on beta. And that's
where I got that information. And also if you want
to drill in air tables, put an incredible support doc together
for us already check out, learn more, and you'll be going to the air table
guide that they've provided for creating your own Interface. But
we're going to jump right in. Let's go ahead and create
new. Give it a name here, pop in a description as needed and
notice that your Interface will become accessible by the home screen. Meaning that when someone's
actually logged into air table, and let me go ahead and pop into
my standard air table for you here. When I click into basis
now from the home screen, interfaces is going to pop up
at the very top of all of this. So right here on the left-hand side,
above my workspaces, I have interfaces. And that is where that Interface is
going to show up once it's created. So let's go ahead and pop back into
that Interface and we'll skip the description for now and click next. You can walk through the
different steps here, create new, and I've got three different examples
that I can choose from to kind of get started quickly. Or I can
start with a blank canvas. I'm going to go ahead and start
with the record summary here. You'll notice that when
I make that selection, my image changes here and I get a
different preview of what's to come. I can go ahead and click next. And here I'm being asked to link
up to the right table so I can either tell it well, yeah, I want to look at clients at the high
level and you'll notice that this dropdown up here has my clients in it. And
when I've selected the clients, it's showing me some information that
it thinks I want to see in my Interface, namely the project that's
connected to that client, the client name and phone number.
But if I make a change here, changes the projects. Let's
say now in my top dropdown, I'm selecting from a project.
I see the name of the project. I see what client is linked to
it, the start date of the project, and then all the tasks. So what I'm seeing inside of
this is a breakdown of all of the things that are visible
to that particular record. And I'm making the selection of
the record here at the very top. I'm going to go with projects. That
sounds like a good pick for me. And if I want some data
options to come in from a view, if I have multiple views, I could do that. Perhaps I want to limit certain things.
I don't want to show all the fields. This is the point of using the Interface
to begin with because the interface is objective is to make a workflow
more streamlined so that you don't get stuck. Seeing all of the stuff that
you don't want to see. And instead, you're only seeing the data that you need
to see in order to perform a specific task or workflow for now.
I'll stick with my grid view. If I want to apply a filter, you
see that I can apply them here, condition and condition group, just as we now have those more
advanced filters inside of our views, we can apply them here as well, and
then a sorting option as well. Now, if I'm good with this, I'll
move on to next. From here, we're asked to choose what
fields are going to show up. If we want to hide those fields.
Again, all we do is toggle them off. Any fields that are showing
up in our projects table. We can either elect to show
or hide from this particular Interface. I'll keep it all there just
for the sake of seeing it in action. Click next, give this a name kind of description. If
we'd like and finish. And here we are right
inside of our Interface. We now have a clean interface
that we can interact with. And the cool thing is we have the
ability to include other things as well. One thing that really
strikes me as creative is the
ability to add in the record comments. This is one of those things that if we
were working with another external third party tool, we don't get access to those
comments that live inside the records, but here, because we're building
this Interface inside of air table, I can use these record comments
just by clicking and dragging. I can move around here. Let's say I want
to put them right next to the client. And there it is the comments that live
inside of this record showing up directly on my Interface. Now from here, I can go to all elements down here and
you'll see that I actually have a lot of other options. I can do the record picker,
which is this little piece up here. I can add numbers, charts,
timeline, views, grids, filters, dividers, all kinds of things have become available
to me in this new interface Designer. Let's go ahead and assume that we're
happy with this layout and see how this thing works in action. Once
I'm ready to go up here, I can publish this Interface, making
this selection. I can go through here, add the description again
and publish those changes. Once those changes are made, let's pop back into air table and see
how that shows up inside of our account. Here it is at the top. Now that it's been published and I can
click into my test Interface and here is the project piece that we
built inside of this Interface. You can add multiple elements like this, and each one of them presents their own
page or their own workflow inside of this Interface. I'll go
ahead and click into project. And like you would expect here I am. I can select different
projects from the list. And remember it's only going to
be one at a time. So in this case, maybe I want to look at the
dynamite excavation project. It shows me that the client has
Acme. I can leave a comment. And from there, check out all the
information, my start date, my tasks, et cetera. If I click on tasks,
it actually opens up that record. And I want to come back to this thought
when I'm talking about my third and final point in this video. So push
pause on this for now. But of course, if I want to make changes, I
can add a new person in charge. I can add comments here, et cetera,
outside of here. If I back up, go back to the test Interface
in the upper left corner. If I had added other elements here,
they would be visible. But in this case, I only have the one piece to
my test Interface Interface, going back into air table to verify
anything that I do in that Interface is showing up here in my actual raw
data that lives back in air table. In this case, even the comment that I left is now
appearing inside of my air table database. So a really powerful tool, pretty excited to take it out more
and more to see how we can build more efficient workflows with this new feature. So what does this mean for all of those
amazing third-party tools that have come out to solve this problem
in their own unique way? Again, I'm thinking about softer. I'm thinking about stacker and I'm
thinking about many extensions, just to name a few. All of us in the air table community
have grown very fond of these tools and there are constant debates over, which is best why it's best and all
of the amazing things that we've built with those third party user interfaces. So what is my prediction for these? And what do I think is going to
happen over the long haul? In short? I don't think that the air table
Interface is directly competing with the third party Interface. And the reason for that is in order
for you to share your interface with other people, they have to be air table
users inside of your data space. Let's flip back into the Designer and
take a look at what I mean when I go to share this in the upper right corner. If I want to share this with somebody
on my team, when I make that selection, you'll see that air table warns
me, that anyone with this symbol, any email addresses that I've
gone to share this Interface with mentions to me and warns me that they
will be added to the connected base and granted a certain level of permissions
to both the Interface and the base. I can make a change here and to limit
the type of permissions that they have inside my base. But is that really what I want to do
most of the time when we are using an Interface, especially when it's external, meaning that we are giving access
to clients or people outside of our organization, 99 times out of a hundred, we don't want those people to
get access to all of the data. And unfortunately with air tables
Interface, as it is at its present moment, when we share access, we
are sharing all of the data, even though the Interface will definitely
help streamline a workflow doesn't mean that we are in any way guarding
our data or keeping it any more secure. Because again, we're sharing
everything. If I had to speculate, it might have to do with
their revenue model, air table charges per user, that you share access with to your
database in permissions that are greater than read only. So it's in
air table's benefit to convince you, to share your data with more people. Another reason that I think third-party
portals will continue to thrive, even in spite of air table's own
Interface tool is because those third party portals allow us to receive user authentication. When they are accessing our
app with third-party tools, we can build true web apps
and I don't get the feeling, at least not at present that the same
functionality is quite available here inside of air tables, interfaces. Yes, they seem like an excellent
solution for internal teams and for specific workflows, but I don't get the feeling that they're
going to give us a true app experience, a true web app from start to finish.
Now I could totally be wrong about this, but this is my initial reaction after
having played with the tool for a quick 90 minutes or so, let me know what
you're excited about, what you love, what you don't love about the
new air table interfaces feature. And I will see you in the next video. As always. I hope you found that
to be extremely helpful if you did. And you'd like to learn more swing by
our website and see how we can help. We offer a free air table crash course
that will help you level up in air table quickly. And we also
have some paid services, including hourly consultations
with our experts. We have some online courses
and a group coaching program. And for advanced needs, we can build a
bespoke solution for you from scratch. So swing on by, and I look forward
to connecting with you soon.
