This article provides an overview of views within Airtable—what they are, why they're important, and how to make new ones. This article is primarily focused on grid views—to learn more about our other view types, please see the articles for creating forms, calendar views, gallery views, and grouped records.
You may also want to read a related article on sharing or embedding a view on your website.
Users on Airtable's Pro and Enterprise plans have access to two premium view features that allow for greater control over view configurations in a team context: locked views and personal views. To learn more, please see the articles on locked views and personal views.
What is a view?
In a traditional spreadsheet, every user sees the contents of your sheets in the same way—if you want to hide or freeze columns, for example, everyone else will be forced to see those changes as well.
In Airtable, however, you can create views, which are set, specified ways of looking at your information. What does this mean? Well, here are some examples of views you could create:
- If you have a table of tasks, you could create separate views for each workspace collaborator, each of which would only show the tasks assigned to a particular workspace collaborator.
- If you have a table with many, many fields, you can create a view which will hide certain fields and make the table a little easier to navigate.
- If you have a table of meetings with clients, you could create a calendar view which will plot all of your client meetings on a monthly calendar.
The important thing to understand is that a view is just a different way of looking at the same underlying data! (This means that if you edit the data in a record while in one view, it will change that data for all views, since all views are looking at the same record.)
In fact, whenever you're looking at your data in Airtable, you're always looking at your data through a view! Even if you're looking at your data through the default "Main View" that comes with every new table, you're still looking at your data through a view.
A grid view, or table view, is the default view type of an Airtable database on the web client. It closely resembles a spreadsheet as the records and fields are organized into rows and columns, respectively.
Here's an example of a grid view:
When you create a new, blank database, the first view you'll see in a new table will be a default grid view called "Grid view," which doesn't have any hidden fields, filtered records, or specific sorting.
Create a new grid view
To create a new view, click on the view switcher in the view bar, then click the "Grid" option under the "Create a new view" header.
Once you've created your new view, you can name it, show/hide fields, filter out records, and order the records manually or through sorting. The attributes of a grid view that can be saved include:
- Which records (rows) have been filtered
- Which fields (columns) are hidden or shown
- The sorting/order of the records (rows) and fields (columns)
- The width of each field
- The number of frozen fields fixed on the left side of the table
- The row height
After you've created a few views, you can switch between them easily by selecting views from the view switcher.
Hide fields
You can choose to hide certain fields (columns) in a view. Hiding a field does not delete it or alter the data contained in the field; it just hides it from that particular view. You can think of it as a way to minimize distractions in a specific view.
To hide fields in your view, click the Hide fields button in the view bar. This will bring up the hide fields dialog.
When the hide fields dialog is open, you can see which fields are showing (where the toggle is green and switched to the right) and which fields are hidden (where the toggle is grayed out and switched to the left).
For more on hiding fields, please read the Guide to hiding fields and field visibility.
Add filters
You can also choose to hide certain records (rows) from a view based on particular criteria. Filtering a record does not delete it or alter the data contained in it; it just hides it from that particular view. This is extremely useful for surfacing just the records that are relevant for the task at hand.
You can add a filter by clicking the Filter button in the view bar. This will bring up the filter dialog.
From here, you can add your filter criteria. Click the + Add a filter button, then customize the filter so that you can create custom filter statements like "Where Priority is High" or "Where Deadline is before today" or "Where Attachments is empty."
You can also add more filters to filter your records by multiple criteria. Any visible fields that are being used to filter records will have a light green background so you can more easily identify when a filter is being used.
For more on filtering records, please read the guide to filters and record visibility.
Sort records
You can choose to sort your records so that they appear in a particular order based on the values in specified fields. Sorting your records in one view doesn't affect the order of records in other views—it just applies to the view you're currently using to look at your table.
You can apply a sort to a view by clicking the Sort button in the view bar. This will bring up the sort dialog.
From here, you can choose the field(s) you would like to use to sort your records. Click the Pick a field to sort by dropdown and then select a field from the dropdown menu. Depending on the type of field, you can specify whether you want the sort to go in ascending or descending order (A → Z versus Z → A), least-to-most or most-to-least (1 → 9 versus 9 → 1), and so on. You can also add more sorts to sort your records by multiple criteria.
By default, views will have the Keep sorted toggle turned on. This means that records will automatically sort themselves if a change occurs to a record that would cause it to be ordered differently according to the sort(s). If the toggle is turned off, records will only sort themselves when a sort has been manually re-applied, and you can manually reorder records to your liking using the record drag handles.
For more on sorting records, please read the guide to sorting and record order.
Row height
Another way you can customize a grid view is by adjusting the row height. By default, a grid view displays its records at a short row height, designed for maximum density of records. To change row height, click on the row height switcher in the view bar:
Then, select one of the four available row height options: short, medium, tall, or extra tall.
For more information on row height, please see the row height article.
Other view types
In addition to grid views, you can also create other types of views, each of which behaves slightly differently than a grid view. Remember that like any other views, these different view types let you look at the same data from different perspectives.
Calendar view
A calendar view lets you look at your records with dates in the context of a calendar. For more on calendar views, read our guide to calendar view.
Gallery view
Gallery view allows you to represent your records as large cards. For more on gallery view, read our guide to gallery view.
Kanban view
With kanban view, you can visualize your workflow in a board of stacked cards. Click and drag to move cards between different stacks, or reorder them within a stack. For more on kanban view, read our guide to kanban view.
Grouped records in grid view
Airtable's grouped records feature allows you to show your records grouped together based on one or more fields of your choosing. For more on grouped records, read our guide to grouped records.
Search views
If your base has a lot of views, it may be helpful for you to use the view search bar. When you click on dropdown arrow for the view switcher, you can enter a query where it says "Find a view" to find the view you're looking for.
