Import into Airtable — CSV, Excel & PDF

• Overview
• From
• Into

Importing for your users — or for yourself?

Building a product that fills Airtable? A product that creates or fills bases for customers, internal tooling on Airtable — this page is your integration guide: your users bring files, clean records land in the base (and your backend sees every row first), and nobody leaves your app. Read on.

Just trying to get your own file into a base? You have the file and the base; the file is the problem — renamed headers, merged columns, a PDF where a spreadsheet should be. See the wizard handle genuinely messy files in the playground (free, no signup). And a run-it-yourself importer is in the works: your own personal access token, runs on your machine, every row staged for review — and revertible after it lands. Join the waitlist.

Goal: your users bring the file they have — CSV, Excel, even a PDF or a scan — and clean records land in Airtable without leaving your product, and without you writing a mapping/validation UI. The pattern is the same every time: embed → validate → deliver. Mildport handles the first two; your webhook handler owns the Airtable API call.

1. Embed the importer

<mildport-import
  api-base-url="https://imports.your-infra.example"
  license-key="SIGNED_TENANT_KEY"
  catalog-key="airtable"
></mildport-import>

2. Publish a catalog that mirrors Airtable

The schema lives in a target catalog, not in host code. Create it in the catalog editor (/admin/catalogs on your engine, or embed <mildport-catalog-editor>), match the fields to the table you’ll write to, and publish. The widget loads that published catalog by catalog-key.

Model the Airtable columns as catalog fields — Name, Email, Status, Notes is a typical start. Prefer Airtable field IDs as keys so a renamed column does not break matching. Mark anything the Web API rejects as empty (required).

Users then upload anything — renamed headers, six languages, XLSX/ODS, even PDF tables — and Mildport’s deterministic matcher plus the review step produce typed, validated rows.

Need the schema computed per user at runtime, or versioned with your app? That’s the schema-as-code path — pass targets from host code instead of catalog-key.

3. Deliver from your webhook

Clean rows arrive on your signed apply webhook; your handler feeds Airtable:

POST https://api.airtable.com/v0/{baseId}/{tableIdOrName} with {"records":[...],"typecast":true} (PAT; 10 records/request)

Airtable-specific gotchas

• 10 records per request and 5 req/s per base — batch and pace the delivery.
• single-select values must exist unless typecast:true — decide whether new options are welcome.
• field names are case-sensitive; prefer field IDs for renames-proof integrations.

Why not Airtable’s own CSV import?

Airtable’s own CSV import is fine for its UI users — but if your product provisions or fills bases for customers, you need import in your flow, with validation before anything hits the base.

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Try the flow first: the playground (no signup), then the Quickstart and target catalogs. Prices are published — hosted and flat-annual self-host — at mildport.com/#pricing.