Form view - Airtable Tutorial

- [Instructor] One of the most unique features of Airtable is that it let's you create web forms so that the general public can add new records directly into your base. They can even upload attachments into your base as well. So let's say that we want speakers to submit their own information into our speakers table, instead of us typing up all their information for them, the best way to do this is to create a web form. In our view panel here, let's click on form and believe it or not, our form is already done. Airtable took all the fields from our table and added them onto this form. Now we're going to customize this form in a moment, but first let's talk about how forms are completely different than all the other views in Airtable. Unlike the other views that we've worked with forms always appear blank. And that's because they can only be used to add new records into a table. Forms can never be used to edit a record that already exists. So for example, we can have a speaker add their information into our table, but they can't go back later to update their information. Okay. So let's start customizing our form. On Airtable's pro plan, we have the ability to add some images to the top of the form. If you look in the exercise files for this chapter, you'll find a folder of files called form resources. Go ahead and download that folder to your desktop. And now let's click on this button that says add a cover image, and then we'll click on select files to upload, and we'll choose our cover image. And then we'll click upload. That looks great. And now we'll click on add a logo, and we'll click here. And then we'll choose our Landon Hotel logo, and then we'll click on upload. Okay perfect. Now we can give our form a name here. Let's call it speaker submission form. And not only will this name be shown to the general public at the top of the form, but also it has become the name of our view as well. Now we can add a description here. So let's say, thank you for being a speaker at our event. Great. And now we get to our fields. Now one very cool thing is that we can rename our fields here without affecting the official names of our fields in the rest of our base. So for name, we can change this to your full name. And we want to make sure that this field is a required field. So let's turn that on. And let's change title to your title. And we'll do the same thing for organization. We'll change that to your organization. Great. That's looking really nice. Now for our biography field, let's give a little more detail to the speakers about what we're looking for. So we can click here where it says add some help text. And let's type in something like, please type a short paragraph about yourself. And we want this field to be required too, so we'll turn that on. Great. Now this next field is where they can upload their photos. And we actually don't want either of these two fields to show up on our form, because these are actually for our own internal purposes. So we can simply hide them by dragging them off to the left over here. And that's it. We've now finished customizing our form. It's as easy as that. We can preview our form in a new browser tab by clicking on this button in the toolbar that says open form. And this is what our form will look like to the world. Now this is a fully working form. So we can fill it out right now. We have a photo for Victor Gonzalez. So let's type in his name here, Victor Gonzalez, and let's make Victor the CEO of Cupcakes Incorporated. And for his biography, I love making the world's best cupcakes. And for his photo, we'll click here, we'll select files, and we'll choose Victor Gonzalez, and we'll click on upload, and that's it. Now we can submit our form. So let's go back to Airtable and see what happened. We're already in the speaker's table. So let's go back to our grid view. And if we scroll all the way down to the bottom, there it is. A brand new record that just came in from the form. So we've tested our form, it works perfectly, and now we're ready to share it with the world. So let's switch back to our speaker submission form and we can click on the share form button. Right here is the URL that we can give to other people. And that's actually the exact same URL that we went to earlier when we clicked on open form. And if you have your own website, you can also embed this form within your existing site, by clicking on this button that says, embed this form on your site. And now you know how simple it is to create forms in Airtable.