Airtable collaboration overview

You can invite someone as either: 

• Workspace collaborator

• Base collaborator

  • A workspace collaborator has access to all of the bases in a workspace, whereas a base collaborator has access to only the bases shared with them within a particular workspace.

  • Workspace and base collaborators can be added at different permission levels, which determines what kinds of actions they can or cannot take in the workspaces or bases to which they have access.

  • The number of users that have access to a workspace and the workspace's billing plan determines how much the owner of a workspace pays per month. More information on how collaboration might affect billing here.

The user field type allows you to select one or more names from an automatically generated dropdown list of all the users that have access to a base. You can configure the user field to notify a user when they've been assigned to a record.

You can use base share links and view share links to grant external collaborators access to read-only versions of bases or views.

If it doesn't make sense to give certain people full access to your workspace or base—like if you are working with contractors, clients, or volunteers—you can let those people add new records with forms. 

Airtable Sync improves upon the manual, static sharing models of the past such as CSV exporting/importing. Using Airtable Sync, you can sync records from a source base to one or more destination bases. These destination bases do not necessarily need to reside in a workspace that you have access to, which enables more flexibility and granularity in how you share your important information. Once a change is made in a source base, the destination can be made to automatically sync and update to show the most current data. For more information on how to enable syncing, please read our overview support article here.

Airtable Automations can allow your team to create highly customizable notifications. Your team’s individual workflows will ultimately inform which automation actions to use, but three actions are worth mentioning specifically for collaboration:

• Send a Slack message action

• Send an MS Teams message action

• Send an email action

You can find a more in-depth guide to custom notifications using automations here.

A workspace is a collection of bases shared among a group of users. A workspace collaborator has access to all of the bases in a workspace. If you've been invited to a workspace as a workspace collaborator, that workspace will show up on your Airtable homepage.
To invite a workspace collaborator: 

1. Return to the homescreen and open a workspace from the left sidebar.

2. Click on the Share button near the top right part of the screen workspace to which you want to add the new collaborator. 

3. This will open the workspace share dialog.

4. From within the workspace share dialog, you can type in the email address of the person you wish to invite to collaborate on your workspace, set their permission level, then click the blue Send Invite button. Alternatively, if you need to invite many people to a workspace, you can create an invite link that will grant access (at the specified permission level) to anyone who opens the link.

Note

Users with admin permissions on our Business or Enterprise Scale plan offerings can alternatively use Admin Panel to manage users and groups across their organization.

Unlike a workspace collaborator, a base collaborator just has access to the particular base(s) that has been shared with them. They are unable to see or interact with any of the other bases in the workspace in which the shared base lives. If you've been invited to a base as a base collaborator, that base will show up in the Bases shared with me section of your homepage. 

Each workspace in Airtable has its own billing plan. Which billing plan your workspace is on determines some important things, like whether you can use premium features (like Airtable Extensions or the advanced calendar feature) on the bases in those workspaces. Importantly, the billing plan also determines how much the owner of a workspace pays per month for each user with access to the workspace (including both workspace and base collaborators).

1. Open your Airtable homepage.

2. Open the shared base you want to remove yourself from.

3. Click Share in the top right corner, then Manage access.

4. Select the checkbox next to your name.

5. Click Remove 1 collaborator.

Airtable will display an "External" badge on both the data view and on interfaces when a user from an enterprise is working on an app not owned by their enterprise. In practice, this means that a user claimed by a specific Enterprise Account ID will see an “External” badge when working on applications not owned/managed by that same/Enterprise ID.

External badging and language can be seen on several Airtable surfaces and on both mobile and desktop experiences:

• Forms - A note that “This form is external to your organization” is shown at the bottom of the form.

  

• The data layer (Bases) - An “External” badge is shown at the top right corner of a base.

  

• Interfaces - An “Ext” badge is shown at the bottom left corner of the interface. When hovered over with a mouse, the message “This interface does not belong to your organization” will be shown.
  

  

1. To email an individual record, select the record you want to send and right-click to bring up a dropdown menu. Then, click the Send record option.
   

2. You can also send multiple records at once by selecting multiple records, right-clicking, and selecting the Send all selected records option.
   

3. Sending a single record or multiple records will bring up a setup box in which you can: 

   1. Insert the email addresses of the people to whom you would like to send the records

   2. Set a subject line for the email

   3. Write a custom message in the body of the email

   4. Toggle between using the grid layout

   5. Toggle between sending a copy of the email to yourself
      

4. Emails sent this way will come from the email address noreply@airtable.com. It's a good idea to ensure that those emails aren't flagged as spam by your mail server. At this time, there isn't a way to change the sending email address. Workarounds are listed under "advanced record sharing" in the dependencies section below.

• Users working in a Free plan workspace are not able to send emails to email addresses outside of the Airtable accounts listed as collaborators within that workspace.

  • Users will also need to have verified their account email to receive those communications.

  • To protect against spam attacks, emailing records is limited to 10 requests (emails) per hour with each request allowing a maximum of 15 recipients.

• For more advanced record-sharing functionality consider using:

  • Airtable Interface Designer

  • Document automator

  • Send email automation action

  • Google workspace: Send email automation action

  • Outlook: Send email automation action

Comments are visible in a record's activity feed and the record-level revision history after a record has been expanded.

• Records with comments are indicated by a visible number to the left of the record's name.

  

• In an expanded record, you can comment in the text box at the bottom of the activity feed where it says “Leave a comment.”

• You can mention collaborators in the comment box by typing the @ symbol in the bottom right of a comment box.

  • After mentioning collaborators, they are notified of the mention and provided a link to the record. Remember that while drafting your message, the comment box will show which collaborators will be notified when you post your comment. 

  • Note that when mentioning collaborators, they are automatically notified of additional comments you make on that record, even if you don't directly mention them. 

• When hovering over a comment you can also:

  • React to a message with emojis by clicking the smiley face icon.

  • Create a comment thread by clicking the dialog bubble icon.

  • Delete or edit a comment you previously made, click the ... icon.

    

• We do not support searching for comments.

• To create a copy of your preferred base without comments, you can duplicate the base and uncheck the "Duplicate comments" box.

• You can learn more about using AI to summarize comments in another section here.

Note

Enterprise Scale and Business customers are also able to tag user groups in comments and long text fields.

There are four general ways to start watching comments:

1. By manually setting yourself to watch a record's comments in an expanded record. 

2. By commenting on a record. 

3. By being mentioned in a record or a comment.

4. Finally, you'll be set to watch comments on any records when another user (or automation) adds you to a user field type with the option to "Notify users when they’re added" turned on before adding new collaborators to records.

Note

Note that if a user has previously chosen to not watch the comments for a record, then options 2, 3, and 4 above will not automatically set the user to watch the comments. That user will need to manually turn the option to watch the record back on using the expanded record method listed in option 1 above.

To configure your watch settings, expand a record. The right side of the dialog is the record's activity feed. At the top right, click the "Watch comments" bell icon. Clicking this will allow you to change your watch settings between "Not watching" and "Watching comments."

If you don't want to watch comments, you can just set your status to Not watching again. At this time, it isn't possible to enable or disable watching multiple records at a time using this method.

If you comment on a record, or if another collaborator @mentions you in a record's comments, then you will automatically be set to watch the record's comments in question. If you are not watching a record's comments, then you can also be notified if someone @mentions you in a long text field. For more on commenting and @mentioning, see the article Comment on Records and @Mention Collaborators.

When a user field type is set up to Notify users when they’re added, it will automatically cause future collaborators to also be added to watch any comments that they are assigned to.

Additionally, this makes it possible to watch multiple records' comments at one time, by copying and pasting a collaborator's information to multiple cells at the same time. You can also use the fill handle, but note that both options will overwrite rather than append any existing collaborators added previously.

Finally, it's worth pointing out, that users will still only be able to disable watching comments one record at a time by clicking the expanded view of a record as mentioned in the "Expanded record watch settings" section above.

You can summarize all of the comments made in a record within a base or an interface.

From a base:

1. Navigate to the record of your choice and expand the record.

2. At the top of the comments section on the right side of the expanded record, click Summarize.

3. Depending on the number of comments, it may take a moment for the AI to finish summarizing. Once finished you’ll see a text summary appear.

From an interface:

1. Navigate to the interface page and record of your choice and click into the record details. Note that not all interface pages allow for record details to be viewed. Additionally, not all record detail pages will have comments enabled.

2. Click on Add a comment… near the bottom of the record detail page.

3. Click the Summarize option.

Regardless of the surface you are using, the AI may take a moment to generate a summary of the comments for you to read, especially when there is a particularly long comment history.

Note

Make sure that you are in the “Comments” section. If the dropdown option is on “All activity” or “Revision history” then you will not see the Summarize button appear.

1. Click the … icon in the upper right corner of the summary box.

   

2. Click the Delete summary option.

3. After deleting the summary, the Summarize button should reappear.

Expected behavior

• All comments will be summarized

• Summaries can be seen by other collaborators

Limitations

• A subsection of comments cannot be summarized, only the whole feed of comments can be summarized.

• The Airtable Web API is unable to pull out the metadata of summarized comments

• When the “Prevent external users from seeing each other” setting is enabled, the ability to summarize comments will be disabled