Take time to disconnect and find the wonder in the world around you.

Jane Goodall may have advised (citation missing)... “Nature does not require a Wi-Fi connection.” she continues. Well that's something you may now have in common with nature.

In this guide we'll introduce you to a few methods for dealing with airtable offline, starting of course with our own solution. We will then cover some of the other free and paid solutions out there along with possible gotchas involved.

1. How to edit airtable offline using WhatsNext
2. How to use google sheets to edit airtable
3. How to use a csv backup to edit airtable

Using WhatsNext for editing Airtable data offline

This is what WhatsNext was made for!

You will need to sign into airtable and ensure your administrator has given WhatsNext access to your base.

Once that is done, WhatsNext will download either part or all of your base locally. This needs internet access to complete. WhatsNext will start with your schema and then download all rows from the tables you have access to.

Once this has completed when you have internet access WhatsNext will update from the airtable base and upload any new rows you may have created since the last sync. If you are continuously connected there should only be a second or two delay. Otherwise, if you have significant changes, it may take a few seconds.

WhatsNext will try to handle changes to the schema and conflicting data automatically. However any changes will be made with history included. This lets you look back in time and see when resolutions were made as well as possibly exporting old versions if you want to change how items were merged.

Pros:

• It's software specifically built for using airtable offline
• It's fast to onboard and fast to edit
• It let's you automatically backup your data
• It saves history of all your changes offline
• You will have direct access to the founder

Cons:

• It does cost some money

Using Google Sheets with zappier

Keep Google Sheets and Airtable in sync in both directions: New/updated rows in Google Sheets → Airtable New/updated records in Airtable → Google Sheets

This requires 4 Zaps (2 directions × create/update separation). Zapier cannot “watch” for changes without triggers designed for them, so each pathway needs a Create and an Update zap.

Pros:

• It's free

Cons:

• It can break easily (doesn't handle changes well)
• can infinitely loop causing issues in airtable without some care
• Doesn't scale beyond 1-2 people (no conflict resolution, built in rate limiting)
• doesn't support more complex airtable fields
• google sheets on mobile isn't ideal

for more details we'll be publishing a future the blog post: Google Sheets -> Airtable Syncing via Zappier

Use a csv backup to edit airtable

Whether you use WhatsNext, a CSV backup solution such as on2air, or the google sheets solution above, the last resort can always be manual syncing. You can download your base or the tables you wish to edit to a CVS file. Edit them in google sheets offline mode or excel. And then either override the full base with the updates or copy and paste them back into airtable. It's not pretty, but until WhatsNext, it was the path many recommended.

If you use WhatsNext for this you can always export the most recent CSV using view -> export CSV. On2Air also supports CSV

Pros:

• It is possible
• You will be familiar with every single change made

Cons:

• It still will cost you money
• It will cost you even more time
• You may make mistakes copying your changes manually