Filtering AirTable data based on blank columns

[Jon]

I feel like I’m maybe missing something very basic here or potentially just being stupid, but here we are. I’m trying to import the data from a specific View in AirTable.

I haven’t seen mention of View import anywhere so I’m guessing that isn’t supported yet, but no matter because the data I need has a field populated that is blank for other records. This is where I’ve hit a roadblock. Is there a criterion that exists like ISBLANK, EXISTS, ISNULL to filter based on the presence of a field? How should I approach this?

It would also be super useful to have a function cheatsheet like Google Docs has so new users can get an idea of what’s possible.

[sourabh]

Hey @Jon thanks for writing in. You’re right about views — we only support tables and not different views at the moment however, I think we should be able to achieve what you’re looking for using our GET_RECORDS_AIRTABLE function.

Here’s an example — consider the following table in Airtable:

It contains 2 columns and say we wanted to import all the rows except the one where the Capital is Berlin. In that case, I’ll use the function in Rows like so —
=GET_RECORDS_AIRTABLE("app14iKLr47MIBN8m","Capitals",,"Capital","<>Berlin")

While we don’t have an external list of all the functions, you can access them all by in a list format by clicking on our Function Wizard icon here —

To make things even simpler, I generally recommend users to simply start typing the function/activity they want to engage in and our autocomplete feature would show them the functions that currently exist on our platform, right from inside the cell too

In case you’re looking for any integration-specific function, you can also always navigate to the integration page directly to know about which functions exist and what they do too — example: for Airtable, that would be this page where you can scroll down and then click on the Functions tab know more —

Hope this helps but please feel free to write back in case I could be of any further assistance.

We also offer free onboarding calls to our users to help them navigate some of these things too —

30-minute Rows Onboarding - Rows

[Jon]

Thanks Sourabh, so is there a syntax I can use to filter for records that have any value (except blank)? Could I use * as a wildcard for example?

[sourabh]

Must confess: I didn’t know the answer to this one myself but after experimenting for a while, tried the not equals to operator <> and it worked.

Here’s the same example (with more data) — here’s the snippet of the table in my Airtable base:

And the function that I’m using in Rows is like so —
=GET_RECORDS_AIRTABLE("app14iKLr47MIBN8m","Capitals",,"Capital","<>")

This will return results where that particular column is not blank.

Hope this helps.

[Jon]

Ah-ha! I knew the functionality must be there somewhere! Thanks for your help