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

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.

Data copy permissions

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. At this time view share links are read-only, and it’s not possible for viewers to make edits to the records in the shared view.

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 viewer will need to refresh the page to see the most up-to-date version of the view.

If you'd like to take extra precautions to ensure that the configurations of your view share links won't get accidentally changed (and you're on an Airtable Pro plan), you can lock the view being shared, which will prevent all collaborators from altering a view's configuration until it's been unlocked by someone with creator permissions.

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 "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!