Formula auditing

Feature Requests
#1

Hi, urgent upgrade needed to be better able to audit formulas! I’m tryign to substitute a working Excel file we use to track all company sales & financial status. Multiple triggers are formulated & simple (but lengthy) formulas are used.
Just pointing this out as constructive feedback: one of the best performance edges AirTable has is that it really is Excel on steroids (migrating from excel to AirTable is fairly easy to do); I’m finding it time comsuming to get a grasp of how formulas in Infinity work.

Urgent upgrades needed:

  1. Extend formula input box to the length of the formula. It is difficult to audit long formulas in such a reduced visibilty field! (see attatched images for comparison).

  2. Autodetect formulas. Not entirely sure if this is not here, or I haven’t found it yet, but autodetecting formulas as you begin to type them is a huge time saver!

  3. Auditing aid. If a formula does not have the correct syntax, the only visual warning is the formula box highlighting red on the margin, but you cannot see firsthand WHERE the mistake is being made. Getting this feedback from the system is a huget time saver as well!

  4. Parenthesis. Differenciate embeded & parent parenthesis with different colors / bold, like in Excel. This visual aid helps the user follow through the formula syntax as we are writing them, otherwise, if there is no visual aid on the parenthesis, again, it is difficult to spot mistakes quickly.

  5. Simple is better. I tried this operation [ "EndDate() - StartDate() "] and it returns an ERROR. Turns out the only way to do it is with the DAYS() formula. We should be able to use EITHER way. Refering again to AirTable for constructive purposes: making it easy to use simple operators (+,-,*,/) is best, like they replicate from Excel. I had to come here to the forum to research for a fix around this problem, and found that many others had the same issue. Infinity is great at saving time on many other fronts, but this needs to be revised as well, as this whole process is a big time waster!

Hope you take the feedback into consideration & act on it quickly, please! Formulas are a feature I, personally, will be using quite a lot.

Thanks!
Diego B

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#2

Hey there @diegobermudez :wave:

First of all let me wish you a warm welcome to our community forum :+1: Thank you for joining, we are glad to have you here! :partying_face:

Now, let me focus on your awesome and constructive feedback. :pray:

  1. I absolutely agree, this needs to be addressed as most of the time we can’t see what the full formula is, if we made any mistakes, if we used the correct attribute or anything similar.

  2. With us you need to select the formula you want first, as you start typing “SU” as an example, you will get all the formulas starting with SU letters. Our formulas do not work the same as in other tools (excel for example, and I’ll expand on that in a moment).

  3. True, the border becomes red and it’s telling you that something is wrong (it’s the only visual cue), if you do not get it correct or if the syntax is slightly off it won’t execute - which isn’t great. This is a valid point as well!

  4. I agree, it’s a visual and a minor thing, but for the users who are experienced and heavy formula users, this might be useful!

  5. Yes, as mentioned previously, in most cases you will need to select the formula first and then get to calculating or getting the results you need to get / want to get!

This might come as a surprise but our formulas work only horizontally and are tied to items themselves, meaning each item gets its own result. You can’t use our formulas and pick a specific cell where you want to get a total sum of some other column (vertical) like you can in excel. :x:

Also, currently, our formulas work with: text, number, date and label attributes, others should be introduced to the formulas later on, as we improve them further! :blush:

Besides that, there are numbers of things to add, improve and change! In the near future we will be changing / switching to a better / newer version of formulas, which is going to change how some of our formulas work.

These are all excellent suggestions and I’ll make sure to personally create an internal ticket for them - as I want to discuss this with the team and see how, what and when these changes / improvements can become a reality! :speech_balloon:

Thank you and cheers @diegobermudez :beers: