You can integrate Airtable with Google Drive, which will allow you to create Airtable bases directly from within Google Drive, create shortcuts to Airtable bases within Google Drive, and sync your Airtable bases to Google Drive.
Connecting Airtable to Google Drive
Creating an Airtable base from Google Drive
Automatically sync Airtable bases to Google Drive
Airtable permissions and Google Drive shortcuts
Connecting Airtable to Google Drive
Before you'll be able to create new bases from Google Drive or sync Airtable to Google Drive, you'll need to connect Airtable to Google Drive. From Google Drive, click on the My Drive menu, then the More option, then select the option Connect more apps.
Search for Airtable, then click the blue Connect button next to the Airtable app.
Once you've successfully connected the app, you should see a confirmation dialog that says "Airtable was connected to Google Drive."
Creating an Airtable base from Google Drive
After connecting Airtable to Google Drive successfully, you should see Airtable as a selectable option from the My Drive menu, or as a selectable option when you right-click in a Google Drive folder.
The first time you select the Airtable option from within Google Drive, Google will ask you to grant permission to Airtable.
After giving permission (or immediately after clicking the Airtable option from the Google Drive menu, if you've already given permission), you'll be redirected to the Airtable home page, where you'll be prompted to add a base to one of your teams.
By default, the new base you create will be untitled, but of course you can title it and customize it to your liking.
When you change the name of the base, the name of the shortcut in Google Drive will change accordingly.
Some things to note when creating Airtable bases from within Google Drive:
- If you delete the Airtable base from within Airtable, the corresponding shortcut in Google Drive is not deleted.
- If you change the name of the shortcut from within Google Drive, the name of the Airtable base itself will not change.
- However, if you change the name of the Airtable base from within Airtable, the name of the shortcut in Google Drive will get updated accordingly.
Automatically sync Airtable bases to Google Drive
To enable automatic syncing of Airtable bases to Google Drive, you'll need to go to your Airtable account page. On the account page, there's a section where you can manage your Google Drive integration.
If you haven't yet linked Airtable and Google Drive, you'll need to do that first.
Otherwise, if you have already linked Airtable and Google Drive, the Google Drive Integration section should include an option to automatically sync your bases to Google Drive.
Checking this option will enable automatic syncing. The timestamp of the most recent sync will be shown, along with a clickable link to sync now. (Note that you cannot sync more than once every 10 minutes.)
Enabling automatic base syncing will create a folder named "Airtable" in your Google Drive account's top-level folder.
Inside this folder, there will be a base shortcut link to every base for which you have access.
Some things to note for automatic syncing:
- If you delete a base from Airtable, the corresponding shortcut to that base will be deleted from the "Airtable" Google Drive folder on the next sync. (This is in contrast to creating a one-off base shortcut, where deleting the Airtable base will not delete the shortcut.)
- If you delete the entire "Airtable" Google Drive folder, the syncing step will create a new one and sync to the new one, even if the old folder is later restored.
- If syncing is on and you move a shortcut out of the Airtable folder, a new shortcut will be created in the Airtable folder on the next sync. This means that there could potentially be multiple shortcuts in your Drive to the same base.
Airtable permissions and Google Drive shortcuts
If from within Drive, a user shares the shortcut with another user, the other user will be able to click that shortcut and land on that base on Airtable, but Google Drive permissions are not respected. This means that if the shared user doesn't already have access to that base from within Airtable, they'll need to request access, and if a user is later unshared from that shortcut via the Drive interface, they'll still have access to the Airtable base via their Airtable account.