Discussion: Airtable Lack of Markdown Import Disappointment

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1

Hi Folks… I just want to express my sheer frustration with Airtable’s lack of support for importing Markdown into it’s rich text fields. I’m trying to consolidate all my past content in one place (with Softr on top of course) and I keep running into roadblocks.

Per their docs:

In long text fields, with rich text enabled, Markdown must be typed into the Airtable UI for it to appear. Any copy/pasted text will not be recognized as Markdown syntax.

Apparently it is possible with their REST API, however that just seems like a lot more work, with what I’m sure will include lots of complications. Zapier/Make imports don’t work out of the box.

At this point, I’m (sadly) considering Notion as the database as it’s import support is very rich. This of course would force me to build outside of Softr (until Notion support comes out). I don’t want to do that since I :heartbeat:Softr and have built so much already.

So… anyone else run into this? How did you get around this? Anything I didn’t think of.

2

Any scripting extension that could work?
Did you try to launch this subject in the airtable community? Some of Airtable folks are extremely good at finding workarounds.

3

Another thought is that inputting the markdown through a softr form will do the right thing, because that is actually using the airtable api.

4

Yeah, searched the community and even asked support if there’s a beta. No dice. Even tweeted about it publicly. Seems like it’s not much of a pain point for many. They’re totally fine typing in markdown manually… or skilled enough to use the API.

5

Interesting angle @dcoletta, although that would limit any automation AFAIK.

6

@ayman what automation do you have in mind ?

Airtable’s markdown is not following markdown rules, even when people type sometimes they mix it up. They are able to render in Airtable but other systems who follow proper markdown they can’t many times (including us)

7

Hi @artur! Yeah, I know airtable’s markdown is a bit limited. They don’t even support full Github markdown.

So markdown import workflow is two parts:

  1. Import all my old blog posts and content in one place. Create a tagging and index system.
  2. Take any guides created in scribe or etc, export them to markdown, and add to my customer knowledgebase.