Working with external users

In many cases, you might need to work with people that you don't want to bring on as workspace or base collaborators. For example, you might need to collect information from contractors, clients, or volunteers without showing those people anything in your bases; you might also want to show people some parts of a base without showing them all of the information in a base.

In these types of situations, you might want to consider Airtable's forms (for soliciting data from external collaborators) or share links (for showing data to external collaborators).

Forms

Forms let you collect information from anyone and save it automatically to an Airtable base. Forms are automatically generated from your existing table and then give you the ability to rearrange and remove fields. On Pro plan workspaces, you can get additional form customization options.

Forms are useful for collecting information from contractors, clients, or volunteers, without having to show those people anything in your bases.

Read this for a step-by-step guide to making your own forms.

Base share links

As an alternative to adding individual people as collaborators, you can create a read-only share link that allows anyone with the link to view (but not edit!) an Airtable base. This share link will automatically stay up to date with any changes you make to the original base. The share link uses a private URL, but you should still use this feature with caution—as anyone with whom you share the link (or who then shares the link with others) can view your content.

If you are part of a Pro plan workspace, you can add an additional layer of protection to your share links by restricting access only to users from a certain email domain, or by restricting access with a password.

To create a base share link for a base, click that base's Share button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Once there, click on the option to create a shared link to the whole base under the preview links header.

Read this for more information on creating base share links.

View share links

In addition to creating a share link to an entire table, you can also create a share link to just a specific view of a table within a base. The viewer of the share link will not see any fields (columns) or records (rows) that are hidden in this view, and they’ll always see the most up-to-date version of the view. As with base share links, the share link uses a private URL, but anyone with whom you share the link (or who then shares the link with others) can view your content.

If you are part of a Pro plan workspace, you can add an additional layer of protection to your share links by restricting access only to users from a certain email domain, or by restricting access with a password.

To create a view share link, navigate to the view you want to share, click the view share button in the view bar, then click the create a shareable view link option.

Read this for more information on creating view share links.