10/15/2024 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S20-E02

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The BuiltOnAir Podcast is Sponsored by On2Air – Integrations and App extensions to run your business operations in Airtable.

In This Episode

Welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast, the live show.  The BuiltOnAir Podcast is a live weekly show highlighting everything happening in the Airtable world.

Check us out at BuiltOnAir.com. Join our community, join our Slack Channel, and meet your fellow Airtable fans.

Todays Hosts

Alli Alosa – Hi there! I’m Alli 🙂 I’m a fine artist turned “techie” with a passion for organization and automation. I’m also proud to be a Community Leader in the Airtable forum, and a co-host of the BuiltOnAir podcast. My favorite part about being an Airtable consultant and developer is that I get to talk with people from all sorts of industries, and each project is an opportunity to learn how a business works.

Kamille Parks – I am an Airtable Community Forums Leader and the developer behind the custom Airtable app “Scheduler”, one of the winning projects in the Airtable Custom Blocks Contest now widely available on the Marketplace. I focus on building simple scripts, automations, and custom apps for Airtable that streamline data entry and everyday workflows.

Dan Fellars – I am the Founder of Openside, On2Air, and BuiltOnAir. I love automation and software. When not coding the next feature of On2Air, I love spending time with my wife and kids and golfing.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:01:40 –

Meet the Creators – 00:01:40 –

Meet Martin Malinda from PowerSave.

‘m a web developer and an automation specialist. I’ve been building user interfaces since 12yo. I started using Airtable when I was creating herohero.co and my co-founders were using too many spreadsheets and I thought there must be a better way.

Visit them online

An App a Day – 00:01:41 –

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the PowerSave App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Save to Airtable with AI”.

View App

Field Focus – 00:01:42 –

A deep dive into the Rollups Rollup – Find Averages and Other Tricks 

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:01:40

Roundup of what’s happening in the Airtable communities – Airtable, BuiltOnAir, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Segment: Meet the Creators

Start Time: 00:01:40

Martin Malinda –

Meet Martin Malinda from PowerSave.

‘m a web developer and an automation specialist. I’ve been building user interfaces since 12yo. I started using Airtable when I was creating herohero.co and my co-founders were using too many spreadsheets and I thought there must be a better way.

Visit them online

Segment: An App a Day

Start Time: 00:01:41

Airtable App Showcase – PowerSave – Save to Airtable with AI

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the PowerSave App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Save to Airtable with AI”.

View App

Segment: Field Focus

Start Time: 00:01:42

Learn about the Rollups – Find Averages and Other Tricks

A deep dive into the Rollups Rollup – Find Averages and Other Tricks 

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

[00:00:00] intro: Welcome to the Built On Air Podcast, the variety show for all things Airtable. In each episode, we cover four different segments. It's always fresh and different, and lots of fun. While you get the insider info on all things Airtable, our hosts and guests are some of the most senior experts in the Airtable community.

[00:00:26] Join us live each week on our YouTube channel every Tuesday at 11:00 AM Eastern and join our active [email protected]. Before we begin, a word from our sponsor on. On2Air Backups provides automated Airtable backups to your cloud storage for secure and reliable data protection. Prevent data loss and set up a secure Airtable backup system with On2Air Backups at on2air.

[00:00:49] com. As one customer, Sarah, said, Having automated Airtable backups has freed up hours of my time every other week. And the fear of losing anything. Longtime customer, [00:01:00] David states, onto where backups might be the most critical piece of the puzzle to guard against unforeseeable disaster. It's easy to set up and it just works.

[00:01:08] Join Sarah, David, and hundreds more air table users like you to protect your air table data with onto where backups. Sign up today with promo code built on air for a 10 percent discount. Check them out at onto air. com. And now let's check out today's episode and see what we built on air.

[00:01:37] Dan Fellars: Welcome in to the built on air podcast. We are in episode two of season 20. Good to be back with you. We've got the full crew back with us. Kamille and Allie. Welcome to have Kamille back and welcome in Martin. Hi, Martin. Hello everybody. Good to have you on and we'll learn more about Martin later in the show, but [00:02:00] good to have him with us.

[00:02:01] I'll walk us through what we're going to be talking about today. As always, it's an hour long show, keeping you up to date on everything in the no code, low code world of Airtable. We always start with our around the bases with all the community action and conversations. And then a spotlight on our sponsor on to our backups.

[00:02:20] And then we'll learn more about Martin Melinda and, and his story and background. And then he's going to be sharing with us his product that he built called PowerSave. And then we'll talk about how you can join our community and be a part of. Group, and then we'll finally end with a feature on roll ups and how to use them for some tricks the trade from Ali.

[00:02:47] So that's 

[00:02:49] ROUND THE BASES - 00:02:54 around the bases first, we got to give a shout out to dare table coming up. Next week in New York City, [00:03:00] I know Kamille, Ali, and myself will be there, along with many other Airtable users, so if you have not signed up, I believe there still are tickets available. So check it out at dare table.

[00:03:12] com also saw Allie post on LinkedIn that she is ready to go doing junction tables. What's your function? A little shout out to what's that from? I know what's it from 

[00:03:27] Kamille Parks: schoolhouse. Yes, 

[00:03:30] Dan Fellars: that's right. 

[00:03:31] Kamille Parks: Don't make me feel older than I already feel today. Dan, 

[00:03:36] Ali Alosa: everybody, all the adults, like I should say. Older adults, I guess I am an adult, but , like my dad was like, no one's gonna know what that's a reference to.

[00:03:46] And I'm like, no. They still play it in schools, like Mm-Hmm. . Yeah. People younger than me. 

[00:03:52] Dan Fellars: Yeah. I think I'm older than it. I don't, I don't, I, I know it, but I think it might be from my kids' generation, , [00:04:00] but cool. And Ally, what are, or Kamille, what's your, what's your topic? 

[00:04:06] Kamille Parks: I'm gonna do a. complex series of approvals that can be customized to just about any use case.

[00:04:16] So I'm going to try and make it as interactive as I can. And the good news about Dare Table this year is that at least some of the sessions will be recorded. So if you can't make it, I do believe there are ticket options for you to get access to the live stream and the video on demand. So if you can't make it all the way to New York, you might still be able to watch some of the sessions.

[00:04:38] Dan Fellars: Nice. Very good. Justin chiming in. He, he knows what it is.

[00:04:46] Very good. Okay. So we're excited. Let us know if you're going to be there and we'll we'll catch up with you in, in New York next week. A couple other items from the built on air community. Russell points out, [00:05:00] looks like they, I'm not exactly sure what, what got changed here. I think it's the sidebar.

[00:05:08] What exactly is he referencing? 

[00:05:10] Kamille Parks: I think the language was changed from edit interface to edit pages. I think, 

[00:05:19] Ali Alosa: yeah, I think it just said edit before and maybe it's Now it's more specific to saying you're, you're editing the pages of this interface. They also moved the arrow to collapse it, which is throwing me off so badly because I have muscle memory to just go up to the top left and I'm like, where'd it go?

[00:05:38] Kamille Parks: Oh yeah, Justin saying it used to just be edit. So, Yes. Just a little bit more specific and same what Ali said, the moving of the collapse button, the position of it now is fine, but I am very used to going to the top and being like, okay, well, I guess I'll relearn. Yep, [00:06:00] 

[00:06:00] Dan Fellars: I'm making some tweaks to the interfaces.

[00:06:05] I did not see any new product or any new features released this week, so relatively quiet after a couple of bigger announcements in previous. But some third party, actually this is a, issue Scott Rose is pointing out, if you have a public shared interface, which is a new feature, there is the ability to enable the download CSV button, but it doesn't work to the general public.

[00:06:35] It makes them go and log in in order to download it. So it's kind of misleading.

[00:06:45] Kamille Parks: Yeah. I mean, I think if it's, it should, the button shouldn't show up at all. If it's not enabled for. You know, public use on a public shared view, but there are [00:07:00] a lot of times I could see someone wanting to have that ability to let anyone download CSV. And when you do CSV, it's not like it's taking all of the columns or all of the fields in the table.

[00:07:11] It's just what you expose. So I think, you know, ideally they would just enable this feature so that you could do it from a publicly shared. 

[00:07:22] Dan Fellars: Gotcha. Okay, next one. A couple product updates from third party. So sync grip we had the sun or, or, or we're having the sun. And so anyways, a new integration between air table and MailChimp.

[00:07:44] So from Sync Grip, if you're looking for another tool to connect apps, and then we've got another one from Gavin at CSV Getter. They just announced the ability to [00:08:00] export shared views and some more functionality there that he announced. So, updates there. And then one more Rupert from Docs Automator.

[00:08:13] They now have an extension in the marketplace. So if you were already using Docs Automator, you can now get it inside of Airtable through an extension. So shout out to Rupert on Docs Automator. And then one more. This is a new one called auto frame. And so this is a air table to figma plug in. So it sinks.

[00:08:38] I believe it sinks your air table data to frames in figma. So if you're using figma and want to sync it with your air table data that's pretty cool. And I believe so. You can actually like edit it. Your frame information in Figma from Airtable and it'll update all the, all the [00:09:00] properties. So that's pretty cool.

[00:09:03] We actually did a project similar to this for Miro, so kind of similar functionality to connect to Miro for client project. That's one. Let's see. Next one. Okay, Martin, this is from you. Why don't you give us a description? 

[00:09:21] Martin Malinda: What's 

[00:09:21] Dan Fellars: going on here? 

[00:09:23] Martin Malinda: Yeah, I, I was mostly like sharing a little pain point I have with our table automations that if you have some kind of API that is not entirely consistent in terms of how it sends data like that you have A-J-S-O-J-S-O might have a property and some APIs, for example.

[00:09:41] I think Stripe like would send that property all the time, even if the value is empty. And so then you can map it like, no problem, like your airable automation will just work all the time. But then maybe there is another kind of API, and maybe for some kind of specific, you know, values, it will not send the property at all, [00:10:00] and then your mapping will break, because Airtable will complain like, hey, this property doesn't exist in the JSON at all, and you have to fix it, and then your entire automation is broken, until you fix it.

[00:10:12] You know, resolve it in some way, but it so it like, so there's particle APIs where I struggle to make it work with air table overall, but, yeah, 

[00:10:24] Ali Alosa: yeah, 

[00:10:27] Dan Fellars: yeah. So work around, I think Kamille, you had to work around. 

[00:10:31] Kamille Parks: Yes, I think I'm echoing maybe Russell who said it above me. Normally what I do is I'll have a, Webhook trigger, and then a run a script action that calls whatever service I'm using to receive a webhook from to get properties about that, whatever event just happened so I can get the full response and then modify it if need be, if the [00:11:00] property is still missing, or if depending on how the webhook is triggered, Run into things where the property I need is named differently depending on where the webhook was fired from, but the value is always going to be the same.

[00:11:14] So I have to, like, map it to a consistent, key property. So. It's a little frustrating when you have inconsistent API returns like that and using a run a script action helps as long as in the webhook, webhook response, you have a unique ID that you can pass to the original service and say, all right, now give me all of the same information again, 

[00:11:40] Martin Malinda: basically.

[00:11:43] And then like one little thing that would fix this would be if air table would allow to set like entire object as an input. So far you have to set like a specific value like payload dot name dot or let's say payload dot [00:12:00] name But you cannot just say this my input is just a whole payload because then you could work around much easier 

[00:12:06] Kamille Parks: Yeah, it won't let you return in that screenshot that we're seeing the inserting a script variable, you can't insert an object into it.

[00:12:17] It has to be either a string or a number or a date or something, but not an object. So just putting the entire webhook response in there would make things a lot easier. You wouldn't have to make another API call. But yeah. Yeah, 

[00:12:33] Dan Fellars: that is frustrating. Yeah, okay, so maybe that's something on the roadmap that can, that can improve.

[00:12:44] All right, next one from X Twitter. So there's a, I believe this is a webinar from Airtable tomorrow. October 16th. So talking about, [00:13:00] the future of AI and air table. So if you want to learn more about it and how it works, you can, you can join that webinar link there. There's also a pretty detailed PDF that they put out the ultimate AI guide for marketers in 2024.

[00:13:22] I downloaded this the other day. It's pretty, it's pretty good. Pretty good document, insightful stuff in there. So I thought that was put together well, so you can download that as far as an ebook and last one here, okay. From Ryan, Airtable AI is making me regret leaving Wufoo. Although I don't view that as a direct competitor, but if Airtable help bot, it is not very good.

[00:13:54] I actually just used it yesterday and I was submitting a bug. To, to them. And [00:14:00] I was like, I want to submit a bug to your team. And they came back and said, here's a base to track your bugs and you can download it from the, from the universe. Like, no, that's not what I want. But then it did let me submit a form to.

[00:14:17] To get in contact with them. 

[00:14:20] Kamille Parks: Cool. Well, I can answer this question. Why can't you edit the color of the form? It's tied to the color of your base. So if you change that, you change the color of your forms, but you know, it's universal. So 

[00:14:36] Dan Fellars: there you go. We need. 

[00:14:39] Kamille Parks: You kids and your AI. Back in my day, all we had was people.

[00:14:45] Dan Fellars: We had to figure things out for ourselves. All right. That kind of wraps it up. A short one. Not, not too many updates in the air table world. So thanks Next week. Well, I guess not next one, [00:15:00] but the week after that, we'll have some updates from, from Dare Table. But we will do our show on Tuesday. Dare Table is not till Friday.

[00:15:07] So we're still going to do our regular Tuesday show. And then we might see if we can get a live show while we're at Dare Table next week. So that'll be exciting. 

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[00:15:28] That's where OntoAir comes in. You can back up your data to Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and soon OneDrive. Also in the works teaser Amazon S3, if you want to store it there, that's coming soon as well. And so check it out at ON2AIR. com. We've also recently released our restore functionality to be able to restore.

[00:15:52] Your information back into an existing base or a new base as well. So check it out on [00:16:00] ON2AIR.COM. You can use promo code BUILTONAIR for a discount and make sure that you have peace of mind, that your data is stored outside of air table. Okay. 

[00:16:09] MEET THE CREATOR - MARTIN MALINDA - 00:16:09 Martin, let's learn a little bit about Martin and. His story will make you big here.

[00:16:22] There we go. 

[00:16:24] Kamille Parks: Hi, Martin. Thanks for joining us. 

[00:16:27] Martin Malinda: Hey, thanks. Happy to be here. Yeah. 

[00:16:30] Kamille Parks: So how long have you been using Airtable? 

[00:16:33] Martin Malinda: I think I casually started using Airtable like more than two years ago. And the, I think the first moment was where like we were developing a product and I was doing the user interface.

[00:16:47] I was doing JavaScript, building a lot of UI, building entire new UI, like new product and show the public. And there were other co founders in, in the startup. And I [00:17:00] saw like so many spreadsheets started flying around, you know, like as we started building this thing and besides the development, which was like managed somewhere in GitHub issues and stuff like that, you know, the other, like the business side and the marketing side was just like managed in a lot of spreadsheets.

[00:17:17] And I, like, I was, like, increasingly concerned about that, or not concerned, but, like, it was a little bit annoying that more and more spreadsheets were, like, out of sync, and, you know, having old data, and broken formulas, and, and I was thinking, like, oh, there should be something, like, we, we should do this differently, and, I remembered Airtable at that point.

[00:17:38] I think I saw it mentioned, you know, I think somewhere on Twitter, like who knows when, and it just popped into my mind. I did a little bit of research, like maybe there's like some other alternatives to Airtable right now, but no, like I, I still like reached to Airtable as the, the best user friendly database.

[00:17:56] And, and we started using in the, in the, in the startup and it turned [00:18:00] out to be quite good. Like we used it basically for everything. I started getting into the automation stuff. And even though later when I left the startup I still, like, enjoyed everything that I built there, and I was still, like, reasonably maintaining for them, and, and then I turned into a Airtable freelancer.

[00:18:17] I was like, ah, this is good, this, this helped us, and I, this is a nice compromise between for me, like, you know, clicking around, but also able to do things with code and JavaScript. And I can do a lot of things quicker, which I would do before, just play, just code. Now I can do it quicker. And, and so I turned into an automation specialist and I'm, I'm doing it ever since basically 

[00:18:44] Kamille Parks: offering 

[00:18:44] Martin Malinda: air table solutions to clients.

[00:18:46] Kamille Parks: So as an automation specialist, do you primarily work in air tables, own automations, or are you using other tools like Zapier and make and the others as well? 

[00:18:59] Martin Malinda: [00:19:00] Right. I, I'm trying to do, I like to do a lot in our table automations and, you know, if I don't stumble across the problems, like the one I mentioned before, I oftentimes actually goes quite well.

[00:19:14] I can, I can, I think, scale it up quite well that I might set up one air table automation. And then, like, send a request there to another Airtable automation. So, I can, you know, work around some of the limits. Like, in Make, I could have a huge, huge, huge, like, workflow, let's say. And it could be branched out, but if you can split it into smaller workflows and it can trigger each other with webhooks, you can also get it like, I can get quite far with just Airtable automations.

[00:19:43] And scripts, of course I can use JavaScript so that also and other reasons why I don't have to do as much stuff in make if I can do little ifs and little for loops, right inside the Airtel automation. But besides that, I also use PipeDream. So, [00:20:00] that's my another, like, tool of choice. And I, I like it because it has triggers, it has actions.

[00:20:07] But then when you need code, it has a really good code editor. And. And again, I also, together with AI, I'm going to ask, Hey, give me a pipe dream component for this task. And it almost like works and you can use the entire note, like NPM ecosystem in JavaScript. So it gives you access to so much, so much tools.

[00:20:29] So that makes me look quite productive. So basically air table, pipe dream, and then sometimes they appear if, if the customer needs it a lot. Sure. 

[00:20:40] Kamille Parks: We have, I think, early in. Built on air, you know, in our history, we had every Zapier expert under the sun. It felt like, and then we started having Scott on every season basically.

[00:20:54] And he's a big make formerly known as Integra mat expert. [00:21:00] I myself like N8N, but I don't know if we've had a pipe dream. Like expert on our podcast before. And it is one of the ones that I want to try because there are times where as much as I love low code solutions, I'm just like, let me, I can do this in JavaScript.

[00:21:19] Just give me, just give me something where I can code it up so I can collapse a few nodes together. So I might take a look at it. 

[00:21:30] Martin Malinda: Right. I think, I think the biggest benefit is like the ability to import from NPM. Although it's possible that N eight a N eight A can do that too, I'm not sure, but maybe it can, 

[00:21:41] Kamille Parks: it might.

[00:21:41] I haven't gotten all that deep in it quite yet, but I, you know, I'm trying to branch out and learn all of the. The different tools that help make things like Airtable a little bit more efficient because you can do a lot in Airtable automations, as you've mentioned, and like you, I've [00:22:00] started to break up some of my automations instead of having, I think the max is 25 steps or something like that in one automation, even that you want to break things up to Have one task accomplished so that if there's an error, you don't lose, you know, all of your progress.

[00:22:19] I think that's a pretty good tip for when you're building complex solutions, especially if you're talking to more than one base at a time. 

[00:22:27] Martin Malinda: Right, right. 

[00:22:30] Kamille Parks: So if you've been using your table about two years and you're an air table freelancer now, and you have a product release for air table, which we'll get to in a moment, is there.

[00:22:46] Air table for your more sort of professional side as you're developing things for clients and for your former startup, or do you use it in all aspects of your life as well? 

[00:22:57] Martin Malinda: I'm like, well, I'm definitely [00:23:00] using it as like for my freelancing. I'm dealing with it to clients, but I'm also like definitely using it as like for every for all my like professional needs.

[00:23:10] So I'm also like storing all of the like billable hours that I, that I've charged and invoices and, and my to do list is there as well. So, but like, besides that, like when it comes to like, you know, some kind of like second brain territory, I'm, I'm doing like a little bit here and there. I'm experimenting with that, but I would like to do more.

[00:23:31] I would like to do more over time, but I don't have extensive like Personal life base that that I could reach out to so far. Although I'm, I'm, I started saving books to Airtable, because, because, like, because I'm developing POWERSAVE. I'm saving so much stuff, and I think it's just a matter of, like, organizing it more, and it's just a matter of time till I end up [00:24:00] with like some kind of better like personal life management in our table.

[00:24:04] Kamille Parks: Don't let it take over your life. Let's talk about PowerSafe just a little bit. So what was your inspiration for making this tool? 

[00:24:16] Martin Malinda: Right. I think I like the first impulse was that I was before that I was building like a little bit different platform called Otimo and it was, it was more ambitious. It was a larger scope and it was meant to be like a Social bookmarking tool where you can, with a browser extension, you can save anything you find online and you add it to your to your profile.

[00:24:42] And you ended up with some kind of like feet of things you and others share, like saved, something can be private, something can be public, but end up being like too ambitious, too, too large scope. And I was thinking, how can I make this smaller and smaller in scope? And and I was thinking, okay, let's, let's take the [00:25:00] browser extension.

[00:25:01] And let's focus on Airtable. Let's not save to my own backend, my own server. Let's save to a place which is a great storage of data, which is Airtable, and which I know well. And that allowed me to reduce the scope, like make it like a reasonable project for one person, and and it worked out well. Like, I can actually, I was actually able to deliver an MVP a thing that would, make people even like purchase some like paperwork while before it was spanning to infinity and it was never ending.

[00:25:33] Kamille Parks: That's the problem with building. I'm sure Dan is nodding along. Yeah. It's, it's difficult. We'll, we'll stick to what, you know, would work, what would work for your clients and then what is a maintainable as well. 

[00:25:52] Dan Fellars: Yeah. 

[00:25:54] Kamille Parks: So do you want to? 

[00:25:55] Dan Fellars: Cool. Yeah. Let's let's transition over. Let me bring this back. [00:26:00] All right.

[00:26:02] AN APP A DAY - POWERSAVE - 00:26:08 So we're going to go into power save if you want to get your screen ready.

[00:26:11] There we go. 

[00:26:13] Martin Malinda: All right. You're up. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So power safe as, as mentioned is a. Chrome extension so far. I'll plan to make it work for other browsers as well, but I'm starting with Chrome so far. And it's a tool which you can use to save ASAP to Airtable. And, it should be, like, the goal is to have it as quick as possible, as user friendly as possible.

[00:26:40] And so no matter, like, what you find on the internet if it's, you know, Like a book, or if it's a competitor product, or if it's a, like product on some store, let's say anything you can find, you can quickly save it to our table. The idea is that you don't need to [00:27:00] configure a clipping somewhere.

[00:27:01] You can just save ASAP. And, and that's why, that's why it's a, it's a Chrome extension that, that should allow you to do everything like this. Directly there and so to show it in action, I can, for example, like show it on Wikipedia. I mean, I, I'm looking for some products, maybe I want to use them and I could maybe stumble upon a product or a table.

[00:27:27] And in this case, probably I already know our table if I'm using power safe, but for the purpose of the demo it would go like this that I would, open, open power safe. And in this case, I already have here like a destination called products. And, but I could also pick a different place. I could create a new destination.

[00:27:50] And in this step, I would search for basis. I have two bases here connected, but I could have multiple more as many as I want. And as I, when I pick a [00:28:00] base tables show up and then I can choose like, Oh, to which table I can save this to. In this case, actually, I would like to save it to products and.

[00:28:12] Then I end up with, with my air table table here. So quite similarly as an air table itself I end up with a form and perhaps I can, because there's a lot of stuff here I for saving, I want to simplify things I want to save, you know, efficiently, so let's hide everything and maybe pick only the columns that we want in this case would be name type URL.

[00:28:37] Maybe pricing, maybe description, and in this case, well, I mean, I could type right? I could start typing air table. I could maybe start typing URL. I get some suggestions here, maybe for auto complete. I maybe I can use them. I don't have to use them. But I can also do two things right now. There is one, [00:29:00] Button here for fill, which allows me to do this basic autofill right now, like right away, it's, it's pre configured.

[00:29:10] So it checks like this is a name and it's a single text field. So they're probably, you want to save the page title and this is a URL and it's called URL this, this field. So probably you want to save the URL from the website. So it does some kind of basic algorithm to. Predict what you want to save and, and then it can save the record or potentially, you could do more.

[00:29:35] And there is an AI function, which doesn't do this just plain algorithm matching, but it does, contextual matching with, with generative AI. And here I have two options. I could analyze the whole page, which is probably preferable here, but maybe on a different website. I maybe want to. like match or like [00:30:00] extract information from only specific part of the website.

[00:30:03] So in this case, maybe just from this little box here. But for this, maybe let's try to demonstrate on the full page. And let's see, I could also type custom instructions here on how to extract, but it should work just fine without any instructions.

[00:30:24] All right. It didn't extract that much. I was, I was like hoping for more. I think that should be doing more, but, yeah, let's, maybe let's try again.

[00:30:42] Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So that, so it did a little bit more here. Maybe if I would try the. The restriction and I would say extract from here. Maybe it could be a little bit better. Let's try that.[00:31:00] 

[00:31:04] Yep. So, so yeah, now I'm getting like a little bit nicer, nicer description. So, so that's the AI, like AI has its benefits and cons, right? It's like every time it's a little bit different. It depends, depends how, like the AI, like what kind of mood it has. So how to, how to extract, but then if you want even more precisions, you can actually configure autofills by yourself.

[00:31:27] So I could say for this name I have here like the website meta and page title. So this is pre configured. This is, this was done for me based on the column name and column type, but I could say, I don't want to match like this. I want to set a different value, maybe exact value. I would just type here something, or I could pick some meta information, but the different one, maybe instead of title, I could pick, Something else, or I could even pick by a DOM element.

[00:31:57] So I could write a DOM like [00:32:00] CSS selector, or I can again pick from here and maybe I would pick something like this and I could see that, okay, this works and I could even stack multiple values. So, or multiple configurations. So in this case, if I'm mapping from Dom, from the, from the page content and the value isn't found, I could maybe add like a.

[00:32:23] Like a fallback value and I could say, Oh, but if you don't find that actually use the page title so you can add as many as you want. And maybe even as a third option, I could say, use AI. So the AI would be used conditionally, like maybe the autofill would be instant, but if it didn't find the value, let's, let's run the AI and try to rely on that.

[00:32:44] So, and then I would, yeah, I would maybe here. Actually, let's try. I could actually pick some reasonable. It seems like in this case, our table doesn't allow description. And so, I could add like a fallback here and I could maybe try to pick [00:33:00] some different metal value. If there is something reasonable and actually there isn't, it's surprising that, that, that Wikipedia doesn't provide some kind of, some kind of description, but maybe I could just add like a site name, for example, and then if I, if I run again, I get at least at least this here, or I, or I could, I could do the AI part, let's say, and I could say AI and I could description would be short description of the company and we can try that.

[00:33:31] Okay. And then delete, delete this part here.

[00:33:38] And now it's actually running the AI. And let's see if it fills the description. One thing that I noticed is, like, the speed. Sometimes the speed is very good. And sometimes the speed is less good. It depends on, like, OpenAI, how fast their servers are, but yeah, now I got, like, a reasonable fallback with AI, so I got a good result.

[00:33:57] And then I can save. [00:34:00] And, and save it to our table. Save it to products. And besides that there are other features, so I could also extract multiple information. So far, this is, Like available only with AI, it might be working without AI too, but so far it's available only with AI. In this case, on here I don't see any kind of repeatable information that I could save.

[00:34:25] Maybe some kind of history here, but probably doesn't make too much sense, but you could try, you could try to pick this, and let's see what happens. Maybe this is kind of some kind of listicle. So it might pick something from like name and let's say description. And I would get some kind of repeatable information here.

[00:34:45] But yes. So it's picking out these dates and I'm getting some information about these dates from April to June 20, 2023. So And I could save six records in this case to products. And another part is [00:35:00] update. So besides saving new records as I'm browsing around in the browse on the web, I stump like the URL is changing and power safe can react to your current URL.

[00:35:14] Which in this case would be here, like Wikipedia slash Airtable, and it can check is there already a product or is there already a record in this table in the products table? And, if yes, then it pulls up for you to, for edit. So like right away, find, found my Airtable record, and if I would actually go somewhere else, let's say I'm going to go to San Francisco, it should be, It's a little bit slower for me, but I think it's still loading some data, but yeah, so it didn't find from the record for San Francisco and I could like create an empty record [00:36:00] and start, start saving.

[00:36:02] But if I now go back to air table, it pulls up back the air table record and I could say, okay, this, this is a type group. So this is a platform. I can save it. And then I go, if I go back to San Francisco. I should be getting this San Francisco. Yes, I'm getting the San Francisco record. So, in practice this editing feature can be used for, let's say CRM, you know, you're going from social media profiles, you're working, maybe you're hiring people, or you're doing your sales, and as you're browsing around from profile to profile, like, you will get your record, and you can, you can choose you know, You can, you can save more information about these, about these records as you're, as you're browsing around, or maybe you have e commerce store and you're browsing through your own store of one product after another.

[00:36:56] And you don't have to switch tabs. You don't have to search through the records you [00:37:00] have, like your record will be always pulled up on the right side and you can, you can, you can manage them so it can be used for content management systems as well. Like, you can use this as like a little inline content management systems.

[00:37:10] If your data are in a table, or maybe you are data are not in, like, let's say you have a blog post box. And your data are not, the blocks are not directly in our table, but maybe you still want to save some kind of management about the blog posts, some kind of meta information about what is the quality of the posts.

[00:37:30] And actually I do that with my documentation. So. Some kind of management about the content. And, yeah, that's the, that's the core core part is of course, like there's more features around against shortcuts you can, to, to make it faster and, that's about it. That's about it. 

[00:37:55] Kamille Parks: That's 

[00:37:55] Martin Malinda: really, 

[00:37:56] Dan Fellars: it is a cool product.

[00:37:58] Kamille Parks: It's [00:38:00] there's a lot of features that differentiate it from Airtable's own web clipper. So. With Web Clipper, you could do things like insert, the expected class name or HTML property that you want to, So in this case, if we went to San Francisco, we would look for anything with an H1 or, you know, as an example, but I really like in power save.

[00:38:27] You have a tool that lets the user just click on an element and then it would read back. Okay. Well, this is an H1 with a class of whatever pull that automatically as an option because not everyone is as used to doing inspect to look at a page and then finding the right element that they want to look at in the code of a website.

[00:38:49] And sometimes depending on how the website is built, it's pretty messy under the hood and being able to just, I want this, it's pretty great. 

[00:38:58] Martin Malinda: Yeah. And like in the future, I [00:39:00] would also want to have like a little AI button here, which would figure out the selector for you so that you wouldn't even have to pick the element.

[00:39:06] and or maybe you would pick the element but then the AI would. Polish it so that it's actually more stable and reusable across time because yeah, as you said like these these selectors can break easily 

[00:39:20] Kamille Parks: I also like the ability to update an existing rather than always creating new. That's sort of Airtables MO is all of their various forms solutions are let's create a new record rather than edit an existing.

[00:39:35] And, as you were about to demo update, I was wondering, oh, I wonder how he's going to implement. Picking which record to update and then just using the URL is pretty smart. I mean, that's the one, right? 

[00:39:50] Martin Malinda: So, yeah, yeah. I think, I think usually you want the URL, but I also like, I think actually this updating feature could be the [00:40:00] most unique like proposition for all this product, because when it comes to just saving records, you could be using alternative products, you could be using other web clippers, maybe some automation, like browser automation tools.

[00:40:13] But when it comes to like updating and like having a form pre filled with data, that's, that's something quite unique to PowerSafe. And yeah, it uses the URL, which works in a lot of cases. Sometimes the URL might be a little bit messy, so there might be some like marketing query parameters. PowerSafe tries to clear them out so that even if they're, the URL is a little bit different, it will still apply the record, but it's not perfect.

[00:40:38] But what I would like to do in the future is to allow even configure like custom matching so that. Like quite similarly as to here, as you configure like the autofill, you could also configure the matching configuration. And then sometimes, for example, I don't know, in Gmail, maybe you're in Gmail or in you're in some kind of [00:41:00] direct messaging platform and you're doing outreach or something and you don't have the URL like, or the URL is not really representative of what's happening on the screen.

[00:41:10] And in that case, you could actually pick an element. And you would find the name in some specific element and that would be used to find the matching record. And I think that could be interesting use case. It would make the update feature much more robust, like reliable in different use cases. And I think, yeah, I think like in the future, it could be the unique preposition of this product.

[00:41:32] Because it's missing, like it's filling the gap of, let's say, Airtable and some other CRMs. That's what other CRMs are offering besides just the storage of data. They also have good Chrome extensions, which directly work with Gmail or they directly work with LinkedIn. And, this could be like a good little plugin.

[00:41:57] So they do not have to switch to entire different CRM. If you just want [00:42:00] to have a better Gmail integration.

[00:42:04] Dan Fellars: Justin asks what the. The 2292 badge at the top, what does that 

[00:42:09] Martin Malinda: represent? Right, so this would be the AI credits. Ah, the AI credits. So, so that's the pricing here. I think you can do quite a lot with just, like, for free. Like, if you set up your autofills, or if you configure autofills, and you don't use the AI, and if you don't use this quick AI feature here.

[00:42:30] You can, you can actually like do complex autofills without AI and then you don't ever need these credits. But if you want to have your life a little bit simpler and you want to have this AI as a backup, you know, maybe you stumble across a completely new page and your configured autofill doesn't work there.

[00:42:49] Okay. Let's just, let's just rely on AI. 

[00:42:53] Dan Fellars: Yeah. Maybe talk about pricing. What is, 

[00:42:55] Martin Malinda: how does your pricing work? Right. So there is the [00:43:00] free plan. And then there is the pro plan, which is 5 per month. And with that, you get a hundred credits, which means a hundred AI savings or AI fails. And, but you can also buy more credits afterwards.

[00:43:17] And I don't have all of the numbers in my head right now for the bonus credits, but I think it's from 10 to 20. And I think 20, you will get 500 credits. So that's, I would say plenty. It's like from what I like discussed with existing customers this works quite well. You can, you can save a lot with with this.

[00:43:48] Dan Fellars: Any what, what's on the roadmap, any new features you're working on? 

[00:43:55] Martin Malinda: I would like to, I would like to definitely work more on the update tab. So [00:44:00] that custom matching, I would like to improve, I would like to still improve these autofills. But I think overall what I'm, what I'm trying to do as well is just do a lot and lot and polishing, because this is a type of product that isn't like actually creating completely new, you know, solution, right?

[00:44:21] Like it is a more like a convenience product. And. Whatever you do here, you could also just switch tap and, and, like make it work with like, just insert to our table manually. Right. Or you could use some kind of generic automation software. So I want to make the UX as good as possible. So I'm continuously improving little solid boxes here and, improving little details to make it as user friendly as possible because people like might to use it a lot and on day to day basis.

[00:44:56] So it should be. It should be nice to use [00:45:00] 

[00:45:00] Dan Fellars: any plans 

[00:45:01] Martin Malinda: to incorporate like team collaboration. It could be honestly, like one thing that I'm struggling with right now is the pricing. So I have active users, but because the product can actually do a lot on the free plan. If someone doesn't need the the AI and the, the configurated, you know, Out of fail works with them just fine.

[00:45:26] They don't have really any reason to ever pay. And it would be nice to have an income so I can like, you know, make this even better and improve it and push it and make it the best clipper in the world. And so actually the team feature could be, could be one of the way, one of the reasons, share these configurations with other people and.

[00:45:48] I could also even incorporate comments. So Airtable has comments, right? So far I don't have them integrated, but I could have comments and then once you have comments, you could even [00:46:00] collaborate better. Yeah, it could be like a collaboration tool. You do competitor analysis, if you do product analysis, Yeah, 

[00:46:09] Dan Fellars: there's, yeah, I think, I think you could get, yeah, more pricing, on a team because that's where like one person has the ability to set it up, but there might be team members that are just doing the data entry and not configuring 

[00:46:24] Martin Malinda: it right, right?

[00:46:27] Yeah, that could be that one technical person that just sets up these amazing fallbacks and then everyone can save. That's true. That's a good point. 

[00:46:35] Dan Fellars: But very cool. It definitely is a product. I'm going to check it out. We use the Clipper actually for this podcast. So I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to give it a spin and see how it goes.

[00:46:48] And, very cool stuff. Congratulations. So people can find it at powersave. pro. Is that the URL? Yes, [00:47:00] exactly. powersave. pro check it out. And give him feedback by five, 5 a month is not too crazy. So definitely help Martin out. Okay, let's move on. 

[00:47:13] BUILTONAIR AIRTABLE COMMUNITY - 00:47:18 If you are not part of our community, you should join now built on air.

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[00:47:47] So join us at built on air. com slash join 

[00:47:51] FIELD FOCUS - 00:47:55 with that. Allie's going to teach us her ways of rollups. 

[00:47:59] Ali Alosa: Oh, [00:48:00] right. So this is something that pretty basic, but it's worth talking about. I think, a lot of people don't really realize the little intricacies around. Roll up fields and in particular working with averages in Airtable.

[00:48:21] So I'm just going to point out a couple little things to pay attention to as you're setting stuff up. So, I have a very simple base set up here, I've just got transactions, I made them all a hundred dollars just to make math easy right now. And those are all linked up to months, so I can get the sum of those transactions for each month, and then I've linked the months up to the years, so I can see a yearly level and a monthly level of transactions.

[00:48:51] The gross total here, but let's say I want to calculate my average monthly [00:49:00] income at the year level so I can see over time. Hey, am I getting are things getting better or worse or where I'm at for each year. So if I add a roll up field. And point it at my grossly, my gross sum for each month and change this to just say average of the values, which is what most people would start off by doing.

[00:49:30] First of all, there's a couple little things here. So this NAN is because I don't have anything linked to this year. For 2025, there are no months linked up, so it can't average zero out of zero. Right? So that's just an undefined value. And again, stands for not a number. So if I want to get rid of that, and I do, because if you notice now down at the bottom, my little summary bar is an infinity [00:50:00] symbol, and so I can't actually get the total or get any calculations because of this NAN here.

[00:50:08] So the first thing I would do is I would actually just add an if statement in here, which is something that, a lot of people don't realize you can do within a rollups configuration. You can actually write. Full formulas within it. So I would just do something like if I can average the values, then average the values.

[00:50:30] And now I can get my summary bar back and do whatever calculations here that I want to. And I don't have this ugly NAN here anymore. 

[00:50:41] Dan Fellars: That's it. If you were at the bottom to change it to average. Will it factor in that empty cell or no? 

[00:50:52] Ali Alosa: No, it won't. And that's exactly where I'm going with this next part, which is, no, that's a great, I'm glad you mentioned that [00:51:00] because this four 1667, right?

[00:51:04] I have 5, 000 total across the whole of 2024. And if you look, I don't even have transactions for November and December yet, because we're still in October, right? So, I don't actually want these two records to be throwing off my average, because I haven't even entered these two months yet. So, technically, my average should really only be calculated off of these first 10 months.

[00:51:33] So, it should be 500, right? I've got a sum of 5, 000 across only 10 months. I want, I want to see 500 as the average monthly gross, not this 416, which is being skewed by those two zero values. So there's two ways to do that. I could come in here and use this toggle and say, where gross, [00:52:00] does not equal zero, or, you know, maybe that doesn't, you kind of have to play with what exactly your end goal is, because maybe Right now this is only positive transactions, but if I had negative ones and they did actually end up at zero as the gross, this wouldn't work because I would want it included.

[00:52:20] So, all sorts of different things you want to figure out there. But, the main point is, if I do this, now that gives me just 500, which is what I would want. But, I almost don't recommend doing it this way. Because If I go back to my months table, if I change this summary bar to average, I'm going to get that 416.

[00:52:45] 67 still. And if I had just relied on the toggle in this field, I'm still not going to be able to use my summary bar on this table. And sometimes I want to be able to use this summary bar to get the correct value. [00:53:00] So what I would do is actually the same thing we did before, which is adding an if statement here and saying, if values, some values, or I could say.

[00:53:15] You know, if array join values, meaning if there's anything in this field, even if it's zeros, I want to sum it up. And now These two zeros went away, so they're totally empty. And now my average is 500, which is what I want. And my years table, my average is still 500 as well. So there's a difference between a field returning zero and a field returning blank.

[00:53:47] And if it returns zero, that value is going to get rolled up into your average. And if you don't want it to, you got to work some magic to figure out exactly. How it makes sense to get rid of [00:54:00] those null values. So just a couple little things to pay attention to. Cause when I was first learning air table and configuring averages, I was like, why is this wrong?

[00:54:12] I was like, this is just not the right number. And then I was like, Oh, it's cause I have all these records that are empty or zero. And they're not not empty, excuse me, that are calculating to zero. And I don't want those to be. Thrown into my total. 

[00:54:25] Kamille Parks: Yeah,

[00:54:34] Dan Fellars: that's such a, that's, this is really valuable. It's like fundamental you know, field information, but it really has a huge impact, especially if you're dealing with financial numbers. 

[00:54:46] Ali Alosa: Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. It's something important to pay attention to that you wouldn't necessarily think of until you find the mistake.

[00:54:54] And then you're like, Oh, wait, I should Approach that differently, 

[00:54:58] Kamille Parks: and you make a good point about [00:55:00] consistency because having the value correct in the your year records, You know, average, but incorrect in the sort of view. Like if you had this displayed on an interface, for instance, those two values are going to be different.

[00:55:17] And it might be confusing to somebody because like tech, you can make an argument that both of them are right, but you only want one of those numbers. So you don't need both. So making it correct at the most granular level means that any summary you make off of this both in Airtable and outside of Airtable, if you were in Softer or something like that, you'd be able to come up with the same number across the board.

[00:55:43] Ali Alosa: Exactly. Yep. That's, that's exactly right. So if I had an interface that was, pointed at my years. Table and, or at my months rather depends on which layout you're talking about, but yeah, if I had a number element trying to average up these numbers, [00:56:00] I'd want to really start from this level to be like, if it's blank, that means don't include it.

[00:56:06] That way that number will always match across all your different entry points.

[00:56:17] Dan Fellars: Very good insight. Very helpful. Thank you, Ali. And that wraps up today's show. Thank you for joining us, Martin. Thank you for sharing with us and look forward to seeing your product progress and see you progress in the Airtable consulting world. So people can find you at powersave. pro as well as your own personal website.

[00:56:40] Is that martinmelinda. com? 

[00:56:44] Martin Malinda: Martin Melinda, that outsees it. Yep. 

[00:56:47] Dan Fellars: Very good. And we will see everybody next week for episode three. Have a good week, everyone. Take care. Bye bye. 

[00:56:55] Martin Malinda: Thank you.

[00:56:56] OUTRO - 00:56:56

[00:56:57] intro: [00:57:00] Thank you for joining today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to check out our sponsor, OntoAir Backups, automated backups for air table. We'll see you next time on the Built On Air podcast.