Hello, Product Hunt! At Airtable, we want to make custom software creation more accessible by giving people a wide array of approachable and flexible tools.
Our latest tool for customizing your workflow is the new scripting block, which you can use to edit, write, and run short scripts inside your Airtable databases. With a little JavaScript, you can reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive tasks, uncover deeper insights, enrich your data—all in a fully-hosted environment with documentation and autocomplete personalized to your base.
We’ve spent a bunch of time making the scripting block accessible for less experienced coders, with customizable templates and loads of interactive examples. If you’re used to writing formulas, you can probably change an example script to suit your needs.
The applications for scripting block are really broad—so, to give you a better sense of what scripting block can do, here’s a few examples of scripts made by people in our community:
✏️ Automatically add default values for every field type: https://community.airtable.com/t...
🔮 Forecast sales by month for the next three years: https://community.airtable.com/t...
📆 Detect scheduling conflicts: https://community.airtable.com/t...
📣 Track where you’ve published social media content: https://community.airtable.com/t...
The scripting block is available on the Airtable Pro plan, so if you’re already on a Pro plan, go ahead and add a scripting block to one of your bases. The documentation includes several example scripts that you can use to get started! If you’re not on a Pro plan, you can still take scripting block for a test run:
👉 If you're brand-new to Airtable, sign up today for a free 14-day trial of scripting block and our other premium features: https://try.airtable.com/scripting
👉 If you're an existing Airtable user and you already had your initial free trial, you're in luck—click to activate a new 14-day Pro trial: https://airtable.com/scriptingbl...!
P.S. we’re hiring! Check out https://airtable.com/careers to learn more.
as one of the community developers (openside.com and builtonair.com) and biggest fans of Airtable, using the scripting block is a joy. They have an amazing code completion integration in the block that makes it crazy simple to develop for. This is a great way for beginner scripters to accomplish things in Airtable that would be much more difficult to do via the API.
This looks like a much nicer version of janky Apps Script editor that we used to use in Google Docs! It's really nice that the script can just be visible beside the table for quicker changes.
Who are you building this for? Just one PM's hypothesis here (and heavy AT user), but I would imagine the typical Airtable user is looking to reduce the amount of JS they have to know/write/maintain, while being able to perform advanced functions that I believe you're trying to achieve with this block. With some pretty amazing front end builders like Parabola, and even one featured today in PH (Paragon .. geez, so many P's), where does this feature fit in?
@jacobgorthy Great question. We built this for Airtable users who may be looking for "last mile" functionality that isn't currently supported as first-class features in Airtable. Whether you have a particularly idiosyncratic workflow or want to achieve a specific integration, we see the scripting block as a really expressive tool for building out custom functionality. The nice thing is that you can write a script and other collaborators on your team simply need to click a button to run it!
I really like Google Apps Script and your scripts is definitely something I’ve been waiting for! Combined with your excellent api you’re making airtable much more power-user friendly :) great job guys
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