In November of last year Airtable announced a major new feature, a visual interface designer. In the past, the methods for presenting an interface other than the spreadsheet view were pretty limited. Now you can use a simple drag-and-drop builder to create a user interface and connect it to your data, so any user action on the interface automatically updates the data in your base. You just choose a layout, import a table from your base and start adding design elements to the interface.
There are four layouts to choose from for your interface:
- Record Review - All the records in the base are shown in summary on the left side of the screen - clicking on any one of them displays the entire record so it can be edited. You can also filter the data sent to the interface so that only the records you want to show are actually displayed.
- Record Summary - If you want to work with one record at a time without rapidly moving back and forth between records, this layout allows you to use the entire screen to display all the detail for a given record.
- Dashboard - The Dashboard layout focuses on presenting key data visually primarily in the form of graphs and charts.
- Blank - If you need an interface that doesn't fit into the other three categories, you can choose the blank layout and create a custom interface by adding whatever elements you want.
Elements that you can add to your interface include:
- Text boxes to hold text content
- Dividers to separate sections of the interface screen
- Charts
- Number boxes
- Grid elements to hold table data
- Timeline elements
- Comment boxes
You can find additional information at:
https://www.airtable.com/guides/collaborate/getting-started-with-interface-designer
