The Ultimate Guide To Airtable Forms

Airtable forms give you the ability to easily collect information from a wide variety of users and capture the data in a structured way in your Airtable base.

Using Airtable’s form builder and easy base UI, you’ll be up and running in minutes to create forms for any occasion, from a simple contact form to more complex order entry.

In this article, we’re going to do a deep dive into the functionality of Airtable forms. Don’t worry if you don’t need all of the information now as you build your first forms - this guide will help you whether you are a beginner or a seasoned expert in the world of form building.

What’s exciting about Airtable forms?

Easy to deploy

With most other form builder tools, you have to carefully plan and map all of the different form fields that you want to collect information about.

But with Airtable, the heavy lifting has already been done when you first set up your base. All of the fields are automatically created for you on your form, all you need to do is decide which fields you want to add, remove or reposition!

Works with the Airtable ecosystem

Data is data in the world of Airtable. It doesn’t matter if a record is created via a form or via a user entering it into the UI, you’ll get full access to the suite of Airtable tools, including automations and API, regardless of the subscription plan you are on.

Easy to manage

Simple embedding of forms, conditional logic to create personalized form experiences, creating different forms for a single base - you don’t have to be a technical wizard to start using Airtable forms. You’ll be up and running with the basics in minutes.

Airtable quick start

Creating a form view

A form, in Airtable world, is just another view of a table that you have. Airtable has many different kinds of views that you can utilize. The default is a grid view, but you can add your form view by clicking the plus button next to form under “Create…” in the lower left-hand corner of the side panel.

Managing fields

If you’ve already created fields in the default Grid view, these will display and be available to use in the form. However, all because you have a field in your base does not mean you need to display it on the form. You can drag and drop fields from the form to the sidebar to hide them from this form.

You can also click the + button at the bottom to add a field to the table without having to go back to the grid view.

Field properties

By clicking into a field in the form editor, you toggle the switch to make the field required which will display a red asterisk next to the form field on the front end. The user submitting the form will be unable to submit the form until they have filled out the required fields.

You can override the field name with your own custom label (perhaps a question, such as “What is your first name?”) which will not rename the field in the grid view/base.

You can also add help text for the user. This provides additional context to the user about the type of information you expect they input into the form.

You can also choose to only display the field when certain conditions are met. We’ll dive deeper into some examples of conditional logic later in this article.

Airtable form design

Airtable form design options are a bit lacking (see our section on limitations below). But if your Airtable workspace is upgraded to Plus, Pro, or Enterprise, you’ll be able to add a cover image across the top of the form, add a logo, and remove the Airtable branding on the form.

Cover image size: This image I would recommend doing something abstract as it will always render with a fixed height of 240px, and the width being dependent on the width of the device screen.

Logo image size: The logo has a max-width of 200px. If you uploaded a logo that was 400px x 140px, it will display as 200 x 70.

Add a new record

The default behavior of an Airtable form is to create a single new record for each submission event that takes place.

This is why the form view is tied specifically to a single table, once the data passes through the form, the record is created which stores that data in the table.

It is feasible to create an Airtable form for multiple records, but it takes a little bit of automation magic to make it work. We’ll discuss this later in the more advanced topics.

Airtable form redirect

This is a feature that requires an upgrade to Plus, Pro, or Enterprise. It can be a nice user experience to redirect the user to a custom branded page after they complete a form submission.

Even more important for some businesses is the ability to track form conversions (i.e., what percent of visitors to our site contacted us?) via Google Analytics/Tag Manager.

You can click the pink “Share form” button to copy the URL of your form and share with anyone via email or social media. You can also grab the embed code if you want to embed it into a WordPress or other website.

If you want privacy options (such as restricting to a set email domain or assigning a password, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro or Enterprise plan.

Airtable advanced form concepts

Linked Records

Using linked records with Airtable forms is a very powerful feature that many other simple form softwares do not contain. Instead of being limited to dropdowns, you can maintain the integrity of your base by relating records to one another.

When you have a linked record field type on your form, the form user will be able to select from available records by clicking the + Add button. Then they’ll be able to select the record by searching by the name of the record and clicking on it.

This works for both N:1 relationships (choose a single value) as well as N:N (choose multiple values).

Creating dynamic Airtable forms with conditional logic

It’s best practice to only surface relevant form fields to customers. Doing so creates a more streamlined path since it reduces clutter, personalizes the experience for the user, and can even increase conversion percentage (for contact forms).

To get started, click into the field that you would like to display if some condition is met. You’ll notice a switch that you can toggle, which will reveal the logic builder to create your condition rules.

One important thing to note is that the conditional logic relies on previous form input from the user. That’s why you are unable to add conditional logic to the first field on the form. Any fields that you want to use in the conditional logic must come before (above) the field that will display conditionally.

Conditional fields can be daisy-chained together (Field C is dependent on Field B is dependent on Field A) which can allow you to create fairly innovative paths to display to the user based on their selections.

Airtable form automation

You can easily create automations for Airtable forms, most frequently to enrich form submission records, send out an email or notification, or to split or link records across multiple tables.

Automations start with a trigger, and Airtable has a “When a form is submitted” trigger perfectly suited for this. When you select the trigger, you’ll also choose which table and form this is scoped to.

From there, you can use any number of actions, such as sending an email, updating a record, or using one of the included integrations such as posting a notification to Slack.

Since Airtable lets you create multiple form views for a single base, you might find that you want to limit available options in a single or multiselect field. Rather than duplicating the field and removing options, we can choose to display only the subset we want on a particular form.

Airtable prefill form fields

One of the most useful features of Airtable forms is the ability to prefill data via URL parameters; this greatly simplifies the experience for the user if several of the fields can be filled out for them in advance!

URL parameters

URL parameters are not unique to Airtable. In fact, many of the most powerful websites in the world pass important information via URL parameters.

Constructing URL parameters for Airtable form fields

For any field name we want to prefill, we add the prefix prefill_ to the field name. So if we wanted a Name field, it would be prefill_Name=Dan.

'https://airtable.com/UNIQUEFORMID?' & 'prefill_' & ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT('First Name') & '=' & ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT({First Name}) & '&prefill_' & ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT('Email') & '=' & ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT({Email})

Airtable has made it so much easier by creating a ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT() method that does all of the heavy lifting for us right inside of Airtable!

Using an Airtable form to update or edit existing record

Many form builders are used purely for the creation of new records, but by using a bit of automation magic, Airtable allows us to make changes to existing records.

Hiding fields on Airtable forms with URL parameters

We can add the hide_ prefix and set the value to true so that it doesn’t appear to the end user.

& '&hide_' & ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT('Contact ID') & '=true'

Creating multiple records with an Airtable form

By default, Airtable creates a single record for a form submission. But what if we want to create multiple records across multiple tables in a single base?

Formula Fields

Email Domain:

RIGHT({Email},LEN({Email})-FIND('@',{Email}))

Account Name:

LEFT({Email Domain}, FIND(".", {Email Domain})-1)

Airtable form limitations

Adding images, video, or other embeds is not supported
No custom CSS overrides available
Limited form validation for field types
No native form sections or multi-page forms

Additional questions

Can I set a default value for a form field?

By standard definition, no. Default values only affect records created in the UI, not via forms. However, you can prefill form fields with values via URL parameters.

How do I make an Airtable form timestamp?

Airtable captures the datetime that the record was created, so you can just add a Created Time field to your table.