Table Talk #3: Fields | Airtable

all right hello and welcome to the third edition of table talk my name is aaron cormblett i'm going to be your host today and we're going to talk about fields so for the rest of the session we're going to be talking about the different field options in air table and tweaking your questions live so before we start if you're new here this is a weekly stream from airtable called table talk where i answer your error table questions about a particular feature or surface area of air table so we have some questions that we've curated but feel free throughout the session to go ahead and ask questions in the chat and there's a form that you can fill out and i've got some colleagues taking those questions and adding them to today's agenda but before we dive in i'd love to know and learn a little bit more about you so let me know in the chat first where in the world you're joining us from and then second i'd love to know you know what is your favorite field you know i think we all have that one field that we love or and don't pick like the famous ones don't pick a single select or linked record so tell me a little bit about your favorite field in the chat and yeah say hi so the next 45 minutes to an hour is really your time to learn about air table meet other air table creators and kind of you know deepen your expertise on air table uh formula field love it huge fan as well definitely gonna be talking about that i've got an auto number okay yeah definitely definitely some pros in the chat absolutely love to hear it um cool bone christopher lovett chris welcome appreciate you joining us today um scripting integrations welcome fellow quebecer canadian appreciate you joining us today yeah so with that uh quick intros the table talk happens every thursday at 1 pm east 10 a.m pacific uh we're actually gonna drop a link so every session we hand out swag so my colleagues can go ahead and drop a link where you can give us your information and at the end of the session we're gonna draw uh some airtable swag all right we've got a lot of folks from texas welcome debbie appreciate you joining us today yeah okay so with that let's kind of let's let's dive into our agenda so keep that chat going throughout elsa welcome as well appreciate you joining us today awesome okay so let's go into our agenda for today let me zoom in here a little bit that feels a little better okay so first we're gonna answer what is a field so if you're new to airtable gonna talk a little bit about the basics then a common question which is formula versus roll-up right quite common question we get a lot how do i do a vlookup so we got some airtame some excel experts uh wondering about how to do things they've done in excel uh some powerful but lesser known fields that's probably going to be my favorite questions and then first you know why can you or last why can i only use certain field types for the first field so experts are gonna remember primary field we're gonna be talking a little bit about that again this agenda is questions we've gotten before but please go ahead and fill out the form if you have questions of your own or just go ahead and drop them in the chat really we're here to learn and improve and i'm always looking at the chat to kind of look and surface questions okay so let's kick this off with what is a field so in today's session we're going to be kind of using this furniture company as an example they've got their inventory orders a stock all of that in air table and when you think about fields right so fields are the information you want to track across your records right so every record in a table is one i don't say idea so every table has the same kind of information in it so our products table has products our customers table has all our customer information our orders table has all of our order information so every record every line item represents one of the type in the table now fields represent the information you want to track for each item in your table for each record so when you think about customers your fields are their address what orders have they made how many orders have they done products information like the number of items you have in inventory materials sales price manufacturer's price profit right so fields are all the different elements you want to track across each record and what's maybe different if you're unfamiliar with databases is that you need to specify what type of information you want to track so if you're an excel user or a spreadsheet user you're kind of used to just having all the columns built out and you're inputting information now if you're migrating over to databases or airtable you'll notice that before entering new information it's going to ask you well what type of information do you expect to put in or have to put in so let's say we're adding a launch date for each one of our products we first have to create that field saying that we have to track this type of information for each product name it we're going to call this launch date and then specify a field type this is saying what type of information are you going to go ahead and input there's a bunch of options and we're going to explore a lot of them today you're going to have a long text attachment checkbox and when you're creating a new field you should say well which one maps most closely to the type of information i'm going to go ahead and put in well in our case we're going to go put in dates so we're going to have a launch date and you could see that there's a date you have phone number email as you select that there's some options so format depending on the field type you'll see some options to really configure it the way you want let me move myself out of the way here there we go now i create that field i have a new field and you'll see that it's empty across every single one of my records now again here when you input i can only put in a date and the advantage of that is that it creates consistency right so you know that your launch date is always a date so and then you have these kind of calendars to make it easy to pick and one of the advantages of that the advantages of having consistent information is that you can then build on top of it you can create calendars for instance let's go to our orders you know that there's a order date and because we've specified that it has to be a date field if i go over into my calendar view that's based off of this order date i can create this calendar because we have consistency of information we can then build on top to do things like create calendars or even create applications or dashboards i should say that let you visualize that information so for instance i can have a chart of all of the different statuses my orders are in because i've encoded i've ensured that everyone picks the right statuses we only have shipped processing and delivered another example is that because i know that total costs is a currency field i can create this move myself out of the way there we go i can create this graph that shows us our sales volume per month because i've ensured that the input the information is in the correct format so that's just a quick overview of what is a field a field is the information you want to track across each record in your table and you have to specify before what's going to go into that record what type of information so that we can build on top of that and ensure consistency so today for the rest of the session we're going to be kind of exploring all the different field types that we have and you'll be able to map the ones you want most closely to the information you want to track okay how do we feel do we feel competent about fields general as a theory that's probably the most theory we're gonna do today so let me know give me a thumbs up in the chat i'm gonna go ahead and consider this answered if you're new here this is a very important thing when we click this answer there's confetti that goes off so make sure to drop the confetti in the chat as well boom oh yeah that time of the week awesome okay very simple fields theory boom amazing okay so uh uh we're kind of shifting gears here into a little bit of uh a more complex i wouldn't say more complex question but the question is when should i use a formula field versus a rollup okay so we're first going to say what is a formula field what is a rollup and then kind of give you the difference between the two so i'm sure someone mentioned that formula is their favorite field so it's going to be a fun one for you okay so what is a formula field again gonna kind of if you've used formulas and other tools is quite similar so essentially it lets you take information from an existing table so let's say in our case we want to calculate the remaining stock the amount of uh remaining items we have in inventory now when i think about that the remaining items are the number of items i had initially mine is the number of items i've sold and those two first fields are items that we track in our table right so for instance i have my inventory this is the number of items i have in stock and then i have another field right here which is sold so i'm able from these two existing fields in my table to calculate a third kind of element that i want to track a new field which is remaining stock so whenever you have existing information in a table and it's very important that it's b that information already exists in a table and you want to output something new right that takes those two fields or more fields as inputs then outputs something else a calculation a value a text that checks information you are going to use a formula so in this instance let's look at this remaining stock so let me just open up customize field type just so i can see what the formula is about so we have field type formula we've called it remaining stock and then we're saying take the inventory field so take every take the value and every record for inventory and then subtract sold sold as the number of items we've sold and then that field will become the output of that calculation across each record right so a few differences with formulas that you may have used in the past so formulas apply to the whole field so we're saying this value this remaining stock is always inventory minus items sold so when i save that you'll see that it applies across the board and let's say i update inventory to 25 so i've just updated that value let me actually move and this is something you can do right so i'm moving the the fields close to each other so pro tip you can do that in any view and it'll remain consistent so let's do that one more time let's say i update this to 40. you'll notice that it instantly updates the remaining stock to 37. so this is what we call a computed field which means that it does not have a value that we can input i can't go into it and update information because it's computed it's computed based off of the values in other fields and it's applied across every single record so this is a real time uh kind of field that is calculated based on other fields in your table so i'm just going to use this as a simple example i'd love to know if there are any kind of formula functions let me know in the chat that you'd like us to kind of play around with or that you're curious about i'm happy to do that a little bit after we've talked about formulas so formulas are when you want to take existing values in your table and output something new so and i'll use the chat as examples for which functions within formulas we want to explore after now rollup is a little different right so let's go into our orders table let's go into our grid view and you'll notice here let's take a simple example exutable app right so every single record represents an order and in that order we have the id the total cost which is our roll-up i'll put it right here we have what they bought right so they bought an e-crore share if i click into that i can see that item so let's go into that value and say how much does the e-crore share cost right so e-core share is 80. and so what i'm linking i'm saying this order has this product in it and a natural example is let's say we're adding products let's say we add a second product twist side table so now i have two products in this order of e-crore chair which we just said was 80 and then i have twist side table which is 120. now naturally i would like to know what is the total cost of the order so i'd like to take for this order i'd like to take this value 120 add it to this second value which is 80 so that it outputs 200. now i just said well if you want to take values and i'll put something else you should use the formula field but in this case the values are in another table they're in our products table so for every order i'm linking products and i like to summarize the information in the linked record so when you're information that you want to summarize that you want to add up find an average find the maximum from a linked record that is when a rollup comes in so a rollup takes information from your linked records from another table and summarizes that information according to the information you want to pull out now i just said what i want is i want the sum of the sales prices of all my linked records for every order right so that that feels complex but let's go ahead and break it down one by one so i'm gonna go ahead and recreate this total cost step by step so let's say total cost move myself out of the way boom total cost let's say live and we're going to use a roll-up so let's kind of go step by step i said i want the sum of the values from the different products in the order so products is my linked record so i want to summarize information from the product linked record i'm going to pick products as my linked record and then you'll notice in the second option right here it'll say well what field do you want to summarize in that linked tracker so when you click here it'll bring up all of the different fields in that table so what i want is i want the sales price you just write that out sale price boom and then it's saying well okay now that i have those values for every order well what do you want me to do it how do you want me to summarize that information do you want the average do you want the number of items in that basket do you want the number of unique items do you want the smallest item they've bought the maximum in our case we want the sum so we're saying take the values to go into this linked record take the sale price and take the sum of the values and if we create that field there we go you'll notice that it gives us the total cost let me just hide this one right here hide field where's the height there we go okay what's great about this is that now whenever i add a new product to this order let's say table lamp you'll notice that the cost updates automatically so that's one example of using a rollup and so it feels like a formula it even has a formula bar that you have to input but the distinction between a formula and a rollup they're both computed fields in the roll-up case you're saying summarize information from linked records summarize the information from another table via the linked record does that make sense i know that this is a concept that can be somewhat daunting or intimidating when you first get to it but what you need to remember is create the linked records e and then pull in information from another table using rollups and if you're working within the same table and want to output a new value based on existing values in your table you should be using a formula field amazing take a glass of water okay amazing so again i'm more than happy to talk about any formulas or even those little uh uh roll-up options uh do submit a question in the chat and we're gonna add it to today's agenda so with that hopefully i've summarized the difference between formula fields and rollups so you can really understand it whoop amazing all right we've got through our second question today and this is i would say uh uh the second most favorite question i guess the the the the one i was second most looking forward to and how do i vlookup in airtable uh um so one thing uh maybe i'll share with you is i was a excel power user i spent years in excel and vlookup and match uh an hlookup xlookup whatever kind of function you want i i used it and so vlookups are were my my bread and butter years ago when i was an ex excel junkie um and so this question probably comes from someone who's very familiar with excel and wondering how do you recreate that functionality so let me first start talking about what is a vlookup right really show you it in excel and the challenges uh that come with working in a vlookup and then show you an airtable the equivalent of how to use it so let me know in the chat if you are an excel user if you know what vlookup is uh i have i wouldn't say fond memories of using it every day it was definitely a pain um so yeah let's let's talk about vlookup in excel first and then compare that to air table so i have this very simple sheet here uh and very similar we want to connect orders to customers so i've actually let me uh i already created the vlookup here let me delete it there we go okay so i have my customers so i have just three customers and then i'm kind of inputting their name and their customer email and then i have orders which have an order number the customer name and i want to pull in the email i want to be able to see that customer's email right from the order so that i can email them let them know if they have any issues but that information currently lives in customers so vlookup in excel is a way to search a two-dimensional grid you're saying go to this grid find aaron or find one value in the customer name and an offset by a column right to say give me the second column of this grid that matches a certain name that i'm going to input so set otherwise we're going to say equals vlookup and our search key we're saying okay we'll find aaron right so find this person this value in this grid actually i can make it like this in this grid so once you've found aaron in this little go to the second column and you'll notice that it finds my email it's saying well aaron's email it goes down here it says oh this is aaron let me find their email so i'm going to drop this down it says jeff great i found jeff let me output here and so far it you know works pretty well but the challenges of this is that it's very constraining you don't actually have a link between the customer and the order so for example uh if you input a name that's not there it'll just output the last value in this grid it says well i can't find it let me give you jessica i know that there are some workarounds for that second is that if you change the column if i insert left it breaks right because it goes to the second one and there's nothing there so it's not actually creating a dynamic link between your customer and your orders to be able to say this order belongs to this customer now i'm seeing some folks in the chat recommending other ways of doing vlookups right index match or other ways these are workarounds instead of creating a dynamic link between the two to say this order relates to this customer right and any information that we add to the customer should be available to our orders table because we've associated those two items together now that's not possible with uh excel sheets or just sheets in general because there are two-dimensional grids that have no concept of linking information together and so that's where a relational database comes in so if we look at this example we can say our order is related to this customer so this order this specific order is related to kc park and then we can even access kc park's information like this in this ui to be able to pull that information or just to visualize you'll notice that this way of linking together is not possible in sheets right me as a user as an interface i can't click into aaron and understand aaron's information and vice versa i can't click into all the different orders that someone has made using a sheet so one of the advantages of that is that it makes looking up information and sharing information across two items that are linked together much easier so for instance let's say i want to pull in the customer's email on my order form to be able to see that information and then maybe a little later we'll even show how to act upon that email to send them an email or something like that so right now you notice that i have my customer linked to my order and what i want is a new field that pulls in one value from my customer which is their email now right now i don't have an email field let me add that and you'll notice that i'm creating an email field right here so let's say this is brooke gmail.com reese gmail.com so on and so forth right we'll fill this out a little later so let's go ahead and add a lookup field so i'm going to call this email and the reason i'm using a lookup is that i want to pull information i want to look up information via a linked record for a specific link so i want to go into customer and i want to pull out that email so in those cases you want to use a lookup so we're going to just search for it there we go lookup and just like our rollup first it's going to say well what linked record do you want me to look into is it customer is a product in our case we want to go to product and then it says well what field do you want me to pull in to our orders table from our customers table so let's go into our linked record products and notice that all the fields are there and what i want to pull in is email oh product i customer i was expecting the chat to there we go to correct me on that one but i catch it i catch it there we go email boom so now it's going to go ahead and pull in that information from every customer that we have here so let me create that field you'll notice that some are empty right because we don't have that information for every one of our customers so let me actually go ahead and see how you update that information in real time you're going to see it so let me go into caseypark right here and i'm looking up that information i'm seeing this record in email i can say casey example.com and now it's automatically pulled in to my lookup field i have one single source of truth as i'm updating information into my customer table that look up field brings in the latest updates into my lookup field and so it feels like a vlookup at the end but it's much more consistent it's much more convenient because i can see all of my customers from my orders table and i can see all of a customer's orders from my customer table because i've actually created a relationship between the two and this is one of the fundamental differences between a two dimensional sheet of which you have multiple in a worksheet and true relational databases you can connect information across your different tables and use computed fields like lookup and rollup to be able to summarize information from one table to another look up information from one to another and truly create a single source of truth that is much easier to work with and scales much better than a excel spreadsheet and i myself as an excel power user and much happier to be working in airtable for important workflows cool okay well hopefully that kind of gives an idea to excel users how to probably use the most useful or most used formula which is vlookup in air table quite different but much better results here it comes boom amazing okay question number four let's jump into this what are some powerful but lesser known fields okay uh so one field that i feel like doesn't get uh uh nearly enough love uh is the barcode field uh so i'm i'm big big fan of barcodes so just for some context on what a barcode is um barcodes are just new ways of reading a little numerical packet um and they return kind of an alpha numeric code that just makes it easier to you know find what you're looking for right and so let's say i want to quickly be able to find some piece of furniture in my database but it's hard for me to know that this chair is named madrid chair uh it's we're gonna go way past the hour if we're talking about barcodes so i will try to keep it brief uh but barcodes originated uh wrigley gum was the first to use a barcode if i'm not mistaken and essentially it's because before you would have items and you would need to remember what the items are named so you'd have to look at this madrid chair and say oh that's called madrid chair or this is called drew's table lamp right but once you get to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of items it's very difficult to remember the names of all of them and so a barcode is an efficient way to find information in a database that can get very complex very quickly so in air table we have a barcode field right so it's a field type that is a barcode now what's convenient if you're on your mobile app and you see a barcode you can have a little search that just says okay let me take an image of the barcode it's going to turn it into a alphanumerical and then it's going to find that value in your airtable base now i have a scanner right that's connected to my computer and this works like a keyboard so as i'm scanning things it's going to go ahead and output uh whatever it scans successfully as a alphanumeric code that i can search for in my base so one thing to know is that my barcode scanner is very cheap and i have to hit it a few times uh whether or not it works so let's imagine let's try to find this this little table you can't see the i'm going to try to find this little uh lamp in my database by using the packet i received it okay so this is that so i've got a search i'm going to go ahead and search ctrl f boom and i'm going to scan this barcode full full screen view oh you want it like this okay right so this is the scanner let me see if i can show you the the little barcode right there we're gonna go ahead and scan this with this and try to find what box this little lamp came in okay so i've got control f i have no promises that my scanner works well enough for this to work okay let's see no i gotta be closer i really hope this works let me see if i can squeeze it in my no okay closer i think i've hit it too many times folks one last try oh i had it there i'm sorry folks next week we're gonna get a better scanner one last try let's give it one last try i don't wanna yeah next week i'm gonna order a better scanner we're gonna do it nope not gonna work today folks i had to work earlier today definitely not gonna work today okay but how that would work is that it would search if you can see here there's a little uh i really want to show you off that it works there's a little text i don't know if you're going to be able to see it under the barcode which is x02 lp so william asked a great question you could totally use your phone but i have difficulty showing you my phone on the stream which creates a different way i can't show you the phone but it would totally work much easier on your phone so what this would output is x l two i think oh oh let me just try to fight excel what is the barcode here x oh xo2 there we go it would have output it it would have found this one and it would have scanned it down if it works this is one challenge of doing it live i promise you next week i'm gonna have a better scanner and we're to make this work but that is essentially how in normal if you have a better barcode you're able to input information and scan it in the air table so it's not it's not a live stream if something doesn't go wrong okay so the second one i do want to talk about two other fields really quickly uh this will come again as no surprise to people who have ever worked with me in air table i'm a big big fan of button so we had a um a video that we just released uh on the button field and button is very convenient when you want to give folks a call to action so let's say you are a salesperson i have sales information here right and you want to kind of give folks the ability to say okay click on a button that does some action and uh um so buttons allow you to connect to different elements whether a url or apps within airtable so let me go ahead and create a button field that opens up the catalog for each product in page designer so here i have a catalog of reach item in our store to a side table and as i flip through we've got all the different items that we sell and what we want is to connect this to each record with a button so this is perfect for folks who you want to come in and give clear call to actions to people in an airtable base so we're going to call this open catalog there we go so i'm going to create a button field instead of here the label we're going to say open catalog let's make this a nice little green and in the action this is what we want the button to do you can open a url that's perfect if you're creating content and you have a blog post or a tweet that goes out let's go ahead and open page designer right so you can connect to different apps there were some questions you can also connect to pixels to get stock photography you can send an email using sendgrid let's go ahead and connect to page designer so i'm going to go to my catalog dashboard and let's select this page designer right here so creating that field let me close out show you the the real experience closeout apps suitable lamp let's say i want to say hey i want to kind of see this i can open the catalog and it brings me to that page in page designer so extremely useful convenient way of opening information in page designer using a a button so someone mentioned this when we released the video great point you can connect let's say you have a sync table you can use a button to open the original record in the source table uh if you have access to it right so if you have access to that source space you can click and you can open a source record and that uses a formula field actually so going into here it you know creates a formula uh when you open a url it'll ask you for a url formula and you could recreate the original records url so there's so much you can do with button it's extremely dynamic extremely useful i am personally a big fan of button last one here is the attachment field now i think if you're an airtable user you've probably used the attachment but one really cool thing you do that's relatively new is you can add a little message you can little note to say hey this looks dark or i mean doesn't really make sense on this image but you can add a comment to a specific part of the image and this is great for feedback on creative stuff same thing for videos you can leave a timestamp uh in a message on a specific time stamp so those were the three fields i promised to get a better scanner next week to show you how to use it so i'll see you back next week for that and then we have button and attachment so those were the three kind of lesser known functionality or fields that i wanted to talk to you about let me know what's your kind of uh uh favorite i saw some some auto number definitely happy to cover that later boom all right okay our last question so just get a reminder do drop in uh uh for the swag we're gonna be drawing that after the speed round of our set agenda second now is a good time to go ahead and drop questions for the speed round we're going to spend one minute answering any questions you have around fields or frankly anything else so do again and drop that we're gonna have a colleague add those to the agenda and quickly let's talk about the primary field the first field in every single table so the first field in every one of your tables is special so if i go into the furniture inventory you'll notice that this first field has a little little slightly darker and and what's important about it is that you cannot hide the first field and the reason is is if i create a new view let's just call this primary field just so i can show you and let's hide all fields you'll notice it doesn't hide the first one right so the primary field is always present and the primary field is what's in the record so this is telling people even if everything else is hidden go it'll always show the first one so as a best practice you should show or explain what's in each record so for instance here i'm saying that the rest of the record all the information in this record which i'll expand now is about to a side table it's image it's product id it's category it's inventory and so the primary field is what's in the rec so because of that there are some field types that are not accepted in the primary field so let's go ahead and create a new table and let's imagine we want i don't know manufacturer orders right so we only have sales and we want to create a table by default it is a single line text called name but you could have a different kind of fields as your first one a date a phone number email let me move myself out of the way very useful if you have a crm type functionality currency or number but you'll notice that there are some fields that are not here check box is not here single select is not there and the reason is is that because we want information about the record so it's easy for you to understand what's in this table and what's in every record a check box only has two possible values it has checked and unchecked so it'd be weird to just have a list of checked and unchecked because it's not telling us what's in the record same thing for a single select single select lets you select one option among many and then you would just have fields with the same option right and so because the primary field has this important functionality that it is limited in terms of the info the types of fields you can put into it and so i've said this before but what you want your primary field to be is informative and unique and the reason for that is when you're linking records together if i link a new product what i search on is the primary field is the first field so i'm entering information twist and then i see that record if it was a checkbox i would have say true or one right and i would have many records that are difficult to select from and so primary fields have to be informative and unique and therefore it is limited or more limited in terms of what values you can put into that one good trick is to use it is a formula right so you can use other fields that you fill out whoops can you guys oh move my base there a little bit should be good now there we go is to use a formula field to take values from the other fields and create a unique and informative primary field so in this case we're taking the order id right which is unique but is difficult to understand what it is and then concatenate that with product and product has the linked record of everything that that order is in and it creates this really nice primary field right so it says order number two which includes madrid chair nebula chair and xu table lamp so that is what uh is in why the primary field is limited and some tips on how to make sure that your primary field is unique and informative okay okay great so let's boom oh amazing okay so we've got some good questions here okay great there's a great question here okay we've got some great questions first okay let's put the timer i've got a minute this is a really good question so i might go over and we do have time so let me move myself out of the way boom actually let me read the question first i'm gonna so the question is what field is a good alternative to the collaborative field if all of my users don't have their own airtable account okay one minute for this so um i wouldn't recommend a feel in this case i would recommend a separate table right so you could have a a kind of team table right where you input the information about the respective people who work with you so this could be freelancers and you don't necessarily want them to have an error table account right so maybe i want their name i'm just going to go ahead and delete that you can have an email so just some information i'm just strapped on time so let's say i have jeff gina and july i don't know i'm really bad at this and then i input their email example at example.com and i could pull that information to assign the right person and what's interesting about this let's say you assign an order to your team you can create an automation that pings that person that says hey here's the information this person ordered that so what i would recommend in this case is to create a table with those people's information and then use automations to notify them if you want to so i will spend an extra 30 seconds here where there was a question what if some are collaborators and some are not so you can have a collaborator field right for those that are in your airtable base and you could look up that information right so let's say jeff is casey it's going to be very weird right and jess is july by linking the information role and pulling in lookup like i showed you before you can distinguish between those who are collaborating on your hair table base and those who are not last tip here and i know we're way over one minute when you create that linked record if you want absolutely for it to be someone who's a collaborator you can create a a condition right limit selection to a view so you can limit that to those who are collaborators if that's the case or those who are not collaborators and then you could trigger automations now does that answer your question hopefully it does i thought that was a really important one so i did want to spend an extra minute okay we got 10 minutes here can you demo so second question uh um which is can you demo field formatting options especially for number and date fields absolutely reset the timer click on it again there we go okay so in terms of number fields so there is a distinction between currency and number right so currency you have the option of the symbol and the precision and by default you can add a default so for number where's my number here we go that is the distinction between do you want an integer so full numbers right with no decimals whether you want to allow or not and then the decimals and if you want decimals how many do you want right so those are the options there and you can input a default number so that's two and then final one is date where there are more options i think order has a date boom customize field options you can create a date format right so depending where you are whether you're american european or other create a date format you can also include time right 12 or 24 hour last tip if this isn't the exact formatting you want you can create a formula right that pulls out the exact format that you want with date time format that's it that's my minute that's all i have hopefully that answered your question i'm gonna assume it did boom okay can we get some of the little field specific tips like multiplying a duration field by 60 and using a formula set a rating by populating it with a number from an automation absolutely so great question so i'm going to kind of uh those are actually examples that one of which i've used but one of i'm not so rebecca would look for that second one how to populate a number from an automation let us know in the chat how you do that i don't think i'm going to be able to set that up but i can use that first one as an example so duration so let's go ahead let's go set the timer here boom and let's say i have a duration field that is 450. now the value of duration is that it doesn't work like 475 right what i want is 425 and i can input that information now the trick here is and i think this is what rebecca is alluding to is if you use this in a formula it's going to assume that it's seconds so if i just do a formula field so just duration formula and i just set it equal to duration it's going to output the number of seconds in i think this is 4 hours and 50 minutes if i'm not mistaken so what i can say in the formula field is i can then divide this by 30 or augment it or i can even turn it into text so i can say this video is add a little space there and duration seconds long right and so it'll input that information and say five hours right 18 000 seconds and so it's taken that value from duration and outputting it as seconds very useful uh in some instances so do kind of think about when you input different field types into a formula the output might not be exactly what you expect but as you play around with them and do check out the community for more advanced examples like this i am way over a minute we might have to augment i do not think i can answer a lot of airtable questions in a minute uh but i'll keep practicing all right okay great oh okay great so if you want to if you want to fill out a star rating so if someone says three and you want to make a uh let i'm just going to show quickly a rating field right you can have a number of stars or different styling that you want thumbs up right and this you can just select three but i think if you're using an automation and you input three it's gonna go and create that scale that rating that you want okay i think boom okay can you read the full list of every female type uh okay yeah let's do it why not we got a minute i'll do as many as i can in a minute all right let's go i don't know if someone's trying to create a clip here but let's go let's do it boom okay we got link record number one single line text long text attachment check box multi-select single select collaborator date phone number email url number currency percent duration rating formula roll up count lookup created time last modified time created by last modified by autonumber barcode and button under 30 seconds this is the easiest question uh right there boom the real question is how many of those did you know and know how to use good question colbot i don't know what the the logic is i don't know if the logic is based on when that field was created within the air table uh that is a good question i'm gonna have to ask i think it might be somewhat by importance and then there's there's other right but look up probably is more important or more used than rating or duration so it's a good question i might have to house that one awesome okay so i think with that let's go ahead and do our draw for this week so this is where we do quick drum roll if you haven't might be the last second to fill out and as as we're drawing who's the winner of this week's swag um we are going to be next week uh um excitingly uh dropping a new feature on table talk so i can't tell you what it is uh but next week we're gonna go ahead and drop a new feature and talk about it on table talk so i do hope you're gonna join us so next week we're gonna be talking about views and yes we've launched timeline view but there's going to be more to that next week so really excited um so our winner for swag this week is tommy holmgren really appreciate everyone who uh dropped in really appreciate all of you uh joining this week for table talk so congratulations to you tommy i hope to see all of you again same place same time here next week we're going to talk about views we're going to talk about the timeline view and a soon to be announced feature so really excited to show that off to you next week so with that signing off really appreciate again the time you spent with us and i hope that you learned something and got to meet other eric table creators with that have a great day everyone bye

Channel: Airtable

Views: 893

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Id: _Nc90B1X_64

Length: 56min 4sec (3364 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021