- 14 Mar 2023
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Embed extension
- Updated on 14 Mar 2023
- 3 Minutes to read
- Print
- DarkLight
With the embed extension, you can view content from other websites without leaving your extensions dashboard. Use it to watch videos and livestreams, display data visualizations from other services, reference useful web pages, share a Spotify playlist with your team members, or even look at other Airtable view or base share links.
Watch this video to learn more about how to set up and use an embed extension, or read on for further information.
Setting up an embed extension
To use the embed extension, add it to your base from the extension panel. Click the Add website URL button that appears, then enter the URL of the website you'd like to embed.
When you're ready, click the Update button, and you should see the page, video, live stream, feed, post, or widget appear. Note that if your embed extension is working successfully, you should see a header at the top of the extension that says, "Content loaded from [site]." Clicking on the site link will open the link in a new window. There's also a reload button in the header of the embed extension that you can use to quickly refresh the link.
Depending on the site being embedded, the content in the embed extension will either automatically refresh, or you’ll need to manually refresh it yourself. If you want to refresh the content in your extension, there’s a reload button in the header of the embed extension that you can use to quickly refresh the link.
To change the site being displayed in the embed extension, click on the extension's dropdown menu, then select the Settings option. This will bring up the dialog to paste in a new URL.
Embedding Airtable share links
The embed extension stopped accepting the Airtable share link format https://airtable.com/shrXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
in late 2022. In order to allow an embed extension to function properly, you'll need to adjust share links to include:
/embed/
after airtable.com/
at the end end of the URL
The result should look something like this:
https://airtable.com/embed/shrXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/
Note that this differs from the iframe embed code created when you choose to create an embeddable share link.
Use cases for Embed extension
Not sure what to put in your embed extension? Here are a couple of examples of useful embeds we've tested:
- Airtable view share links (from another base or even from the same base)
- Airtable forms
- Video (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo)
- Livestreaming video (e.g. Twitch)
- Music (e.g. SoundCloud, Spotify)
- Loom (tip: replace “share” in your www.loom.com/share/xxx link to “embed”)
- Figma
- CodePen
- LucidChart
Troubleshooting
Why doesn't my embed code work when I paste it in?
The embed extension accepts URLs (beginning with https://), not embed codes (encapsulated in <iframe>
brackets). If the site you're trying to embed has given you an embed code rather than a URL, just copy and paste the URL as it appears inside the embed code.
For example, if you have this embed code from Spotify:
<iframe src='https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/1230275892/playlist/7nmEuMyigtdUQFqXI9Zf2c/'"width=" 300'="" height="380" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true"></iframe>
You need to copy and paste just the URL from inside the embed code:
https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/1230275892/playlist/7nmEuMyigtdUQFqXI9Zf2c/
I received the error message “This website does not allow embedding.” What does that mean?
Some sites (like YouTube or SoundCloud) give content creators the option to allow or disallow their content from being embedded elsewhere. For these sites, if you're getting an error while trying to embed, it might be because the content creator has disabled external embedding. If you are the original content creator, try checking the settings on the other site to see if there is an option to allow external embedding. Otherwise, you will need to contact the content creator.
However, certain sites (like The New York Times, for example) will not let you embed their content externally at all. If this is the case, you cannot embed this content within the Airtable embed extension.
Lastly, be sure that the embeddable URL contains both /embed/
and a forward slash /
at the end of the URL like so: