Airtable

Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid. In other words, it has the features of a database but within a familiar spreadsheet-like interface. If you’re new to Airtable, we suggest checking out the following resources to get you started.

• Article: Airtable vs Traditional Spreadsheets

• Video: Meet Airtable

• Course: Intro to Airtable

• Support: Airtable Support Center

Integrating Airtable with Glide

1. To use Airtable with Glide, start a new project from your dashboard and select Airtable as the source.

2. You’ll be asked to connect to Airtable by providing your API key. This is just a string of text you need to copy from your Airtable settings.

3. Sign in to Airtable and visit your account settings: airtable.com/account. Here, you’ll see a button called ‘Generate API key.’ Click on it, and a new key will be created. Copy that value and paste it into Glide.

4. After this, you should be able to browse your Airtable bases and select one for your new project.

5. Once you’ve created a new project, you’ll be able to see your Airtable base’s data in Glide’s Data Editor.

Spreadsheets VS Databases

Airtable is a database and therefore has some significant differences to a spreadsheet. If you are unfamiliar with Airtable and databases, we suggest reading this article by Zapier, which will give you the fundamental knowledge you need to start working with Airtable.

What is Airtable? And how it will change your view of databases | Zapierzapier

Views

Airtable is fantastic at letting you view your database in different ways. For example, below, we’re viewing the Opportunities base. But inside that base, there are different views. Each view has its own layout, sorting, filtering, grouping, and more.

This flexibility can, however, be a little confusing when you bring that data into Glide. For example, imagine we have a base in Airtable, and on one of our views we have a filter that hides empty rows.

A view that is filtering out empty rows

In Airtable you might simply forget the fact that you have empty rows — or indeed any other data that you’ve filtered out.

In Glide, however, all of your base's data will be brought in, empty rows included.

This can result in you seeing empty items in your projects.

It’s good to keep at least one 'vanilla' view in each of your Airtable bases that has no filters or other customizations on it. This way you can see all the records in that base and know what will be brought through to Glide.

Fields v.s Columns

In Glide, we refer to ‘Columns’. In Airtable they are called ‘Fields’. Airtable has many different types of fields that you can read about below👇. All field types will be brought through to Glide apart from the Button field type. This is currently not supported.

Field types overviewAirtable Support

At the moment, Airtable’s API does not allow Glide to create new Fields in Airtable. So if you create a new basic column in Glide, it will not show up in Airtable. Instead, it will become a user-specific column and only live in the Data Editor.

Links v.s Relations

In Glide, we have ‘Relations’ and in Airtable they are called ‘Links’.

When you create a link in your Airtable base, it will show up in Glide as a relation column. You can use that data, just like you would a normal relation.

However, because the configuration for that link/relation is set in Airtable, the configuration in the relation column in Glide will be blank and you will not be able to configure it.