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.
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 any number of 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 team member, each of which would only show the tasks assigned to a particular team member.
- 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 the default "Main View," which doesn't have any hidden fields, filtered records, or specific sorting.
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
After you've created a few views, you can switch between them easily by selecting views from the view switcher.
You can hide fields (columns) in your view by clicking the "Hide fields" button and unchecking the fields that you want to hide. The "hide all" and "show all" buttons will let you quickly hide/show all fields (except the primary field, which cannot be hidden).
Alternatively, you can click on a field's field configuration menu from within the table and choose the "hide field" option there.
You can add a filter by clicking the "Add filters" button. From here, you can add your filter criteria. Click the "Add a filter" button to filter your table by a specific column.
For example, if we wanted to filter the records in this view so that you only see records where the "Priority" field is "High", you can configure a filter as follows:
You can filter your records by criteria for multiple fields. For example, we can add another filter such that our view only shows records where the priority is "High Priority" and the Complete? field has not been checked.
You can also change the boolean operator from "And" to "Or", which will make it so that the view will show records matching either of the specified criteria.
You can sort your records by clicking the "Apply sort" button. From here, you can choose the field which you would like to use to sort your records. Click the "Pick a column to sort on" button to add a sort criterion. 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.
To add more sort criteria, click the "Pick a column to sort on" button again. To remove a sort criterion, click the X button.
After configuring your sort, you can click "Apply" to sort all of the records in your view. Note that unlike filters, you have to "Apply" a sort in order for it to take effect. This is so that you have the option to order your rows manually after sorting them.
To learn how to order your rows manually, check out the "Reorder records" article.
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.
A calendar view lets you look at your records with dates in the context of a monthly calendar. For more on calendar views, read our guide to calendar view.
Gallery view allows you to represent your records as large cards. For more on gallery view, read our guide to gallery 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.
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.
If you find that your base has many 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 in the Find a view dialog to look for the desired view.
