Learning Airtable

Chapter 12. Interface Designer

Over the past 11 chapters, we’ve progressed from using Airtable as a simple spreadsheet-like table to using it as a complex system for entering, storing, and moving your data. Still, Airtable can feel overwhelming for someone who isn’t familiar with the platform. And besides, it might be too difficult to train everyone in your organization to understand Airtable’s finer points. Luckily, we can build simple web app interfaces and tailor the Airtable experience to each user’s needs with Interface Designer.

Conceptually, Interfaces are not unlike the views we first looked at in Chapter 4, where each view allows you to view some amount—and aspects—of your data. You can remove records from the view without deleting records if they are filtered out of a view, for example. However, Interfaces can have more customized, interactive components.

Interface Designer makes it easier to work with Airtable and allows you to limit what data users can access. Even more importantly, Interfaces allow you to customize how you interact with your data. For instance, someone on your team might need to create a content approval workflow or enrich information in your CRM. Whatever business function needs to be accomplished, this chapter examines how to build a custom interface to meet your colleagues’ needs.

In this chapter, we will delve into the various layout options and examine the different elements available in Interface Designer, including text elements, record picker ...