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Long text fields in Airtable

  • Updated on Jun 26, 2026
  • Published on Mar 25, 2024
  • 2 minute(s) read
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Plan availability

All plan types

Permissions

  • Owner /Creator - Have access to all field configuration options. Additionally everything editors, commenters, or read-only users can do.

  • Editor - Can sort by, filter by, group by, or hide the field within a view.

  • Commenter / Read-only - Copy a field's URL

Platform(s)

Web/Browser, Mac app, and Windows app

Note
Consider having Omni create a field for you. With Omni's AI capabilities, you can use plain text requests to build, update, and query in your Airtable base. You can also create AI-powered fields called field agents.

In Airtable, long text fields provide more space for text-based information when a single line text field is not large enough. Information in long text fields can be additionally formatted by enabling rich text. You can even generate content in long text fields by configuring AI prompts in long text fields. Whatever your use case, long text fields help to provide more insight about the records you are working with in Airtable.

Adding long text fields in Airtable

NOTE

Single line text fields and long text fields are limited to 100,000 characters.

To add long text fields:

  1. Visit your Airtable homepage.

  2. Create or open your preferred base.

  3. Add or edit a field.

  4. Search for and select Long text.

  5. From here, you can:

    1. Enable rich text formatting - Learn more about using rich text in Airtable here.

    2. Generate text - Learn more about this option in this support article.

FAQs

How can I use AI in a long text field?

Why does my base freeze or fail when I try to edit or paste text into a long text field?

Single line text and long text fields are limited to 100,000 characters per field, per record. When a long text field's content is at or near that limit, editing or pasting more into it can fail — sometimes with a generic error ("An error has occurred" / "You are not permitted to perform this operation") or by causing the page to become unresponsive — rather than a clear "limit reached" message. If a specific record's long text field holds a very large amount of text and edits won't stick:

  • Check the content volume. If the field is near 100,000 characters, you've likely hit the per-field limit.

  • Reduce or split the content. Move part of the text into an additional long text field (for example, an "overflow"/"archive" field), so no single field exceeds the limit. This is what resolves the edit failure.

  • Avoid pasting large blocks into an already-large field, which is the most common trigger for the freeze/error.

This limit is per field per record, so splitting the content across two long text fields gives you room to keep editing.