Tag: Airtable

Airtable Script to Convert Numbers into Words (Automation)

February 15, 2023 / / 0 Comments

When you’re filling out bank forms, the bank documents usually require their customers spell out the amount they put in into words. This is one way for banks to make sure customers really meant the number they put in their forms, and not made a typo. This poses a problem when you’re using Airtable’s Page Designer to auto-populate the bank forms from your Airtable records. Yes, you can type it out in a separate text field, but there must be a way to automate this, right?

Let’s say, you have a field called “Amount Sold” in your base. Go to Automations, and in one of your actions, select Run Script. Add an Input Variable and name it amount_sold , then for the Value select the “Amount Sold” field from your base.

Input Variable in Airtable

Input Variable in Airtable

Now paste the following in the Code area: Continue reading

Docker app for generating PDF from Airtable Records

January 11, 2023 / / 0 Comments

There are several ways to generate a PDF from Airtable records using Docker. One approach is to use a library or framework that can generate PDFs, such as wkhtmltopdf or PrinceXML, and run it within a Docker container.

Here is an example of how you might use wkhtmltopdf to generate a PDF from Airtable records:

  1. Create a new Docker image based on the official wkhtmltopdf image.
  2. In your Dockerfile, install any additional dependencies you need to access the Airtable API and retrieve records.
  3. Write a script that retrieves the records you want to include in the PDF from Airtable, and converts them to an HTML template.
  4. Use wkhtmltopdf to convert the HTML template to a PDF.
  5. Start the Docker container and run the script to generate the PDF.

You can store the pdf in the container and store it or a way to extract it outside of it, with the help of some specific command.

Another approach is to use a pre-built service such as Airtable2pdf that can be integrated with your Airtable bases and generate pdf’s of it.

Note that the above is a basic example and the actual implementation would depend on your specific requirements and use-case.

The above quote was taken directly from the answer of ChatGPT about my query which is the title of this article. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to build a docker image from source, so I didn’t really get the help I needed. Good luck to me and you who are looking for solutions like this.

SmartSuite came to challenge Airtable

September 23, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Airtable has been my favorite No Code/Low Code tool for some time now. In a few years I’ve been using it so far, I haven’t really found a good alternative. Even then, Airtable cannot rest on its laurels. Especially now, a new kid in town, SmartSuite, came to challenge its position. Airtable has already been introducing substantial improvements recently, but it needs to up its game even further to hold on to its lead.

One of my favorite Youtuber, Gareth Pronovost, details down the 3 gamechanging features about SmartSuite that Airtable has to catch up on:

How to: Use Excel Power Query to Retrieve Data from Airtable

March 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

When you have your data neatly set up on Airtable, especially when they are particularly financial data and numbers, you would want to connect to them on Excel (or Power BI), and do the analysis (or charts) from the latter.

Excel’s Power Query can ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) data from your Airtable database, and here’s how to even work around the 100 Rows Limit or Pagination.

What you need are:

  1. Base ID
  2. Table  ID
  3. API Key

So I created a throwaway Airtable account for the API key, a throwaway workspace from that account, and and loaded the Simple Project Tracker base template, just for this demonstration.

You can get your API key from your account page (https://airtable.com/account):

You can get your Base ID and Table ID by going to the base and table you want to connect to and copy them from the URL: Continue reading

Airtable Creator Plan, are you one of the lucky few?

March 31, 2021 / / 1 Comment

Sometime in the middle of 2020, Airtable made available to select new users the Creator Plan. It was not available to everybody. No announcements were made about it. No documentation whatsoever.

The Creator Plan is a totally different workspace account than Free, Pro Trial, Plus, and Pro.

Brief Description

So how to describe this plan? One user emailed the dev team, and this is what she got in response:

The Creator plan is a current experiment that gives a new solo user almost all of including blocks, without the usual time constraints of a Pro trial.

Once the person adds collaborators to the Creator workspace, it morphs into a 30-day Pro trial, to experience the power of Airtable Pro with others. Once users are added to a workspace, all users will have 30 days of premium use before payment is required.

*If no collaborators above read-only are added, the Creator-plan (Pro features) will remain in effect indefinitely.*

If I were to describe the plan briefly: it would be closest to the Pro Trial plan without the time constraints. Yet, let me breakdown the features and compare the Airtable Creator Plan to the other plans the best I could. I’ll update this post as more info come my way. Continue reading

Airtable: You can now group Views into Sections

March 24, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I requested for this feature for a while now in the Airtable Community:

I’ve seen a lot of topics and/or feature requests to hide tables within a base. I want that as well. But on top of that, I don’t see topics here about hiding view items that you’ve actually created, not just those created and made personal view by other users. I’m not referring to how to toggle on and off the Views pane. I mean the different views that you’ve created, whether they be Grid, Form, Calendar, Gallery or Kanban, can they be hidden to declutter the Views pane, or better yet, maybe have the ability to group them in folders?

I have created several views of the same table and they somehow already cluttered my Views pane. I don’t want to delete them because I have certain use for each of them.

And today, look, you can now group views into Sections:

Thank you Airtable for listening to your users. Now I wish I could have the ability to hide this “Create a vew” pane/section.