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 or a specific table view within that base. If you share just a specific table view, you can choose to hide certain columns, or filter out certain rows—and the cell content in the link will stay up to date with any changes you make.
The share link uses a private, randomly generated 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're looking to give your share links an extra layer of security, users who are part of Pro plan workspaces can further secure their base and view share links by restricting access to a share link with a password or by email domain.
You can also embed a full base or table view within the base directly into a website—check out this support article on embeds.
Creating a share link for an entire base
Show all fields in expanded records
Premium plan feature: restricted base and view shares
Restrict access with a password
Restrict access to an email domain
Disabling a base or view share link
Creating a share link for an entire base
Creating a share link for the entire base will let anyone with the share link see the entire base, including all of the different tables. (If there's any sensitive information in the database, you may want to create a view share link instead.)
To share a whole base, open up the base share dialog by clicking the Share button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
Once in the base share dialog, click on the option labeled "Create a shared link to the whole base" under the Shared base link header. This will bring up a dropdown menu with the option to create a Private read-only link.
Clicking the Private read-only link option will generate a share link for the base. You can now send this share link to others, preview it yourself, or embed it into a website.
When someone opens your share link, they’ll see something like this:
The page for this share link is not publicly accessible through search engines. This link will also be "live," in the sense that anyone opening the link will see all your recent changes to the base.
If you toggled the Allow viewers to copy the data in this base option, there will be a Copy base button visible that will allow anyone viewing your link to create copies of your base for themselves; if you left the box unchecked, there will not be a Copy base button and certain other sharing functions will be limited. For more on sharing permissions, please see the Data copying permissions section of this article.
Creating a view share link
You can create a share link to just a specific view of a table within a base—as opposed to the entire base. You can create view share links for all view types—grid, gallery, calendar, or kanban.
The viewer of the share link will not see any records that are hidden in this view. In the event that you change cell values, add records or fields, or otherwise change which fields and records are visible in the view, the link will automatically update in real time to show the most up-to-date version of the view.
Note that if the shared view exposes a column containing linked records, only the names of those linked records will be exposed. Any viewers of your shared view link will not be able to open up a linked record to see all of the fields of that link record, as they would be able to do if they were collaborators with full access to the base.
When you share a view, you will be given a share link to a read-only page showing only the records in the given view. You can then send this share link to anyone, or even embed this view on your own site.
The first step is to create a view for sharing. Then, click the share link button in the view bar. This will bring up an option to create a shareable grid, calendar, gallery, or kanban view link.
Creating a view link will generate a URL which you can copy and paste. Only people with the share link will be able to access this table view.
From the view share link dialog, you can click the preview button to take you directly to the URL and show you how your view share link looks.
Your view share link will look something like this:
You can also click the refresh button to generate a new URL for your view share link. If you refresh the share link, it will invalidate all old links to this shared view.
You can also click the Embed this view on your site option to get a code for an embed (more on that in this support article).
If the view you're sharing is a calendar view, you can click the iCal subscription link option to generate an iCal subscription link.
Lastly, you can click the Disable shared view link to disable the link. For more on disabling a share link, please see the Disabling a base or view share link section of this article.
Show all fields in expanded records
When creating a grid view share link, there will be a toggle available labeled "Show all fields in expanded records." This means that even if you have certain fields hidden in the view, all fields will be made visible when records are expanded in the share link.
Turning on this toggle will give you a final warning—if you add any fields to this table in the future, then any information in those new fields will potentially be exposed to a person viewing expanded records in this published view. Be careful!
Premium plan feature: restricted base and view shares
If you are part of a Pro plan workspace, you can further secure your base and view share links by restricting access to a share link with a password or by email domain.
Restrict access with a password
You can restrict access to a base or view share link with a password. If you do this, anyone that wants to view the contents of your share link will need both the randomly generated URL and the password.
To restrict access to a base or view share link with a password, simply turn on the toggle that says "Restrict access with a password."
Doing this will bring up a dialog box in which you can enter the desired password for your share link. Click the blue Set password button when you're ready.
After you've set the password, you'll see that the share link dialog will have changed to show a lock icon, and what used to say "Restrict access with a password" will instead say "Access is password-protected."
Once access is password-protected, anyone who accesses the share link will see a page with a password input box. To see the contents of the share link, they will need to enter the password you set.
To change the password on the password-protected share link, click the pencil icon. This will bring up a dialog box in which you can set a new password. Setting a new password means that the old password will no longer work.
To remove the password protection from your share link, turn off the toggle. Doing this will bring up a warning message asking you to confirm removal of the password protection.
Restrict access to an email domain
You can restrict access to a base or view share link to an email domain. If you do this, anyone that wants to view the contents of your share link will need both the randomly generated URL and to be logged into an Airtable account using an email address from the specified email domain.
To restrict access to a base or view share link by domain, simply turn on the toggle that says "Restrict access to an email domain."
Doing this will bring up a dialog box in which you can specify the email domain to which you would like to restrict access. Click the blue Set email domain button when you're ready.
After you've domain-restricted the share link, you'll see that the share link dialog will have changed to show a lock icon, and what used to say "Restrict access to an email domain" will instead say "Access restricted to [domain]."
Once access is domain-restricted, only people who are logged into Airtable accounts of that specified email domain will be able to see the contents of the share link. Anyone who accesses the share link while logged out or logged into an Airtable account of a different email domain will see a page informing them that they do not have permission to view the share link contents.
To change the email domain on the domain-restricted share link, click the pencil icon. This will bring up a dialog box in which you can set a new email domain.
To disable the domain restriction on your share link, turn off the toggle. Doing this will bring up a warning message asking you to confirm removal of the domain restriction.
Managing your share links
You can manage your base and view share links from the base share dialog, which can be accessed by clicking the Share button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
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At the top of the base share dialog, there is a a summary of all the ways content within the base is shared, including the number of collaborators, whether or not there is a base share link, and the number of view share links over all of the views in the whole base.
To manage your base share link settings, scroll past the collaborators down to where it says "Shared base link." In this section, you can see whether or not the base has a share link, and change the base share link settings.
You can also collectively manage all of your view share links across the entire base by clicking on the Shared view links option.
This will bring you to a view share link manager that will give you a more detailed summary of all of the shared views that you've created. From here, you can copy all the view share links, preview all the view share links, get the embed codes for all your view share links, and edit all the view share links.
Disabling a base or view share link
To disable a shared base link, go to the base share dialog, then click the dropdown to the right of where it says "Anyone can view (but not edit) this base with this read-only link," then reselect Disable link sharing.
To disable a view share link, go to the view with the share link that you'd like to disable, open up the view share dialog, and click the Disable shared view link button.
Note that if you disable and re-enable a share link (or click the refresh URL button) it will generate a new share link and invalidate the old one. Anyone attempting to use an old share link will get an error message.
Data copying permissions
When creating either a base or view share link, there is a toggle which says either "Allow viewers to copy the data in this base" or "Allow viewers to copy data out of this view," as appropriate.
If this option is enabled, then:
- Any attachments in the base can be downloaded
- All cells in the table can be copied at once through the copy and paste keyboard shortcuts (C and V)
- For a base share link or an embedded base, there will be a "Copy base" button that, when clicked, will allow any people viewing the base to make copies of the base for themselves
- There will be an option to download a CSV version of the data in the current view
If this option is disabled, then:
- Downloading attachments is not allowed (however, attachments can still be viewed, so be careful, especially with image files!)
- You cannot copy and paste batches of cells using keyboard shortcuts
- Neither the Copy base button nor the option to download a CSV will be made available