Can You Export Airtable to Excel?

Superchart
Evidence and Thought
2 min readMay 10, 2023

Airtable is a highly versatile tool that offers impressive capabilities. It generally exceeds user expectations in ease of use and functionality.

Depending on your familiarity with Excel or your need for exporting data out of Airtable, you may be thrilled or disappointed. The basics are available; they don’t lock you down or attempt to keep data within Airtable in any specific way. Your data is your data, and Airtable makes sure you can get it out.

However, if you’re expecting your new Excel export to inherit specific formatting or maintain some of the smarts you’ve configured in Airtable, you may be disappointed. You’re getting data in its raw format (i.e. a CSV, not a rich XLSX file).

How to Export From Airtable to CSV

To export data from Airtable to a CSV file, follow these steps:

  1. Click on the menu next to the current View name in the top-left of the app.
  2. Choose “Download CSV” from that menu.
  3. Select a location for your CSV file and click Export.

Please refer to the screenshots below for a visual guide.

Click the Dropdown for the View

Click Download to CSV

‍‍ You can only download CSVs from a View for an individual Table. This is usually sufficient, but Airtable does have some supported extensions to do more of a full Base or full Table export and backup. It can be time-consuming to click through each view and download.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, Airtable is an impressive tool that offers a great deal of versatility and ease of use. It allows you to export data from your tables in the form of CSV files with just a few clicks. However, if you are expecting Excel-like formatting or special smarts configured within Airtable, then you may be disappointed as it does not maintain any specific format when exporting its data. Nevertheless, for most users’ purposes, this should generally suffice as their data can still be exported easily and quickly using the steps outlined above.

If you’re looking to dig into Airtable more, check out our Airtable guide and other resources. If you want to use Airtable or Google Sheets data to create well-designed data visualizations, try out Superchart for free.

Originally published at https://www.superchart.io.

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Superchart
Evidence and Thought

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