Connectors: bring in a tool you already use

Connect an account you already have — Airtable first among them — and import its data into RowFold as real tables, fields and records. Connect an account Open Integrations, find the tool in the gallery and press Connect. You're sent to that vendor to sign in and approve access, and returned with the connection listed and labelled with the account it belongs to. What a connection is allowed to do differs per tool, and the card says which: Import brings data in, Actions lets an automation write back — post a Slack message, create a calendar event, add a CRM contact — and Availability means a booking page reads that calendar's busy time. Most connectors only read. Where one can write, it writes only when an automation you built tells it to, and most actions hand back what they made, such as the new event's link, for the automation to save onto the record. A connector with a page on the RowFold website, its own or one it shares with similar tools, has a What it does here link on its card, which spells out the setup that a tile cannot fit. Worth following for anything involving a calendar, where connecting the account is only the first of three steps. A tile marked Needs setup isn't broken and isn't something you can fix: it means this RowFold deployment hasn't registered an application with that vendor yet, so there's no Connect button to press. A tile marked Unavailable is one the vendor has switched off. Its card says what happened, and it can't be connected until RowFold rebuilds it. Which tools connect with one click Most connectors need nothing but your own account: press Connect, approve on their side, done. That list has grown steadily — Airtable, Slack, Notion, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Calendar, GitHub, Salesforce, Xero, Smartsheet, monday.com, Typeform, Calendly, Asana, Linear, Excel, Outlook, Outlook Calendar, Teams, OneDrive and HubSpot among them. Others ask for an API key you generate in the tool itself, and those work today as well — paste the key and you're connected. Rather than trust a count written down here, look at the gallery: it lists exactly what this deployment can connect right now. The remainder show Needs setup, which isn't a fault in the connector and isn't something you can clear from your side. They're built, and they light up for everyone at once when the registration lands. Import from Airtable On a connected account, press Import data. RowFold lists the bases that account can see and each gets its own Import button. Pick one and the import runs in the background — tables appear as it lands. If a base you expected isn't listed, check what you granted on Airtable's own consent screen: access is given per base, not to everything at once. Watching it run Progress shows live on the connection itself: what the run is doing right now (“Importing Orders…”) and how many records have landed, updating as it goes, then finally ok, partial or failed with a record count and a timestamp. You can leave the page — the import runs in the background regardless. partial means it finished and recorded warnings — usually fields that couldn't come across as themselves, or a page of records the vendor stopped serving. The first few are listed with a count of the rest, and running the import again picks up what a partial run missed. What comes across, and what doesn't Most field types map straight over: text, long text, email, URL, phone, number, currency, percent, rating, checkbox, dates (including their times), and both kinds of select with their options. Airtable's primary field becomes both the record's name and its first field. Two things that used to arrive as text are real now: links between tables are rebuilt as RowFold relations, matched on Airtable's own record ids, and attachments are downloaded into RowFold's own storage during the import — which matters, because the file links Airtable hands out expire within hours. Two things still arrive as text, each with a warning saying so: • Formulas, rollups and lookups, as the value they had computed to — the expression itself doesn't travel. Rebuild the ones you need in RowFold's own formula and rollup editors; the warnings list every column that needs it. • Collaborators, as names rather than RowFold people. An import brings across up to 100,000 records per table and says so plainly if a table was larger. Some imports arrive already linked. Airtable's links between tables are rebuilt from its own record ids, and FlexBooker's appointments arrive joined to the customer, staff member, services and location they were booked with — the booking tool already knows which is which, so nothing has to be matched by name here. Where an import brings a column of names instead, Convert to Relation… in the field editor turns it into real links. Running it again, and keeping it in sync Importing the same source again updates the tables its first import made instead of duplicating them, whichever tool it comes from. Records are matched on that tool's own ids (a Stripe customer by its Stripe ID, a form response by its response ID, an Airtable record by Airtable's), so new ones are added and changed ones updated. Once a source has been imported, the list of sources names the table it fills and its button reads Import again. The schedule does the same thing for you: after a completed import, press Keep in sync on the run and pick hourly or daily. The rules, plainly: the source wins on the columns the import fills, including clearing a cell that was cleared there, so an edit you make in one of those columns is replaced on the next run. Columns you add in RowFold are never touched, posted records are sealed against it, a record you moved to Trash stays there, and deletions never propagate: a record deleted at the source simply stops updating here. Because records are updated in place, links from your other tables, comments and history all survive. A run that finds nothing changed writes nothing, so it sets off no automation; records it adds or changes set off the table's automations and webhooks like any other edit. A column that is new at the source, such as a question added to a form, arrives as a new field. A field you rename keeps receiving its column and a field you delete stays deleted. A field you change to a type that can't hold text stops being filled, with one warning, and records the import adds from then on arrive with it empty. A field you turn into a link (Convert to Relation…) is the exception, because it is what we suggest doing: the import keeps filling it on the records it ADDS, by matching the source's text against the names of records in the table you linked to, and leaves records it updates with whatever links people made. A name no record has, or one that two records share, links nothing and is named in the run's report. Renaming or moving the table changes nothing. A table in Trash is the exception: pressing Import makes a new table, while a scheduled sync skips it and says so, and restoring it from Trash resumes the sync. A spreadsheet row has no id of its own, so Google Sheets and Excel match each row by its first column. Change a row's first cell and it arrives as a new record, with the old one left where it was. Rows that share a first-column value, or leave it blank, are matched by their order, and the run says how many there are. A source first imported before 22 September 2026 didn't record which table it made, so its next import makes one new table, says so, and updates that one from then on. Airtable attachments are copied when a record first arrives and left alone after that. Stop a sync any time; the tables are yours either way. To bring a CSV or a spreadsheet in instead, use the import wizard, which detects relations between files and can update an existing table by a match column. Tips • Try a base with plenty of linked-record fields first — that's where the real post-import work is, and it's better to find out on a test run. • Disconnecting an account leaves everything already imported exactly where it is. Good to know • Cross-table links from most sources import as text. In the field editor, Convert to Relation… turns a column of names into real links to another table, matching by name and keeping whatever it can't match — including a name that two records share, since picking one of them would be a guess. On a table you keep in sync, later runs go on filling that column by name for the records they add. • No import is a two-way sync: nothing you change in RowFold goes back to the other tool, and an edit you make to a column the import fills is replaced by the source's value on its next run. Keep your own information in columns you add, which an import never touches. Who can do what • Connecting, importing and disconnecting are admin-only, and the Integrations page shows nothing at all to a member.