CSV export to Airtable doesn't work very well

Community resources
1

Hello.
I want to export my Webflow CMS data into Airtable. So I exported my blog as a CSV and imported it into Airtable.
Two things happened.

  1. The rich text field in my collection list is exported with all the HTML tag in it. So P and H1 etc.
  2. The image links got lost in the process. So the image fields were blank in Airtable.

When I tested the CSV - https://csvlint.io - that Webflow generated I saw that it is ASCII-8BIT encoded en not the usual UTF-8.

Has anyone any experience with export data to Airtable from Webflow?

  1. I don’t want the HTML tag’s (rich text field) in Airtable, so how do I fix this?
  2. Where are the image links gone?

Thanks.

2

You would have to run another process on the CSV since WF does not give you formatting on export.

Without sharing an example record (s) from the CSV (with the header) one can only guess.

3

Ok, found out how to make this work!

  1. Export your CMS Collection from Webflow
  2. Transform this CSV file into an Excel.xlsx file
  3. Select the column that contains all the HTML tags
  4. Replace all <*> to - nothing (keep the field empty). Now the tags are gone
  5. Import the Excel.xlsx file into Airtable.
  6. Customize your fields before import
  7. My image fields were marked ‘number’ #
  8. Change this to ‘Long text’
  9. Now you get the URL’s as a text
  10. Check all your other fields and then import the file.
  11. Change the fields to the settings you want in Airtable (date setting etc. )

I tried to remove the tags in the CSV file directly, but that gave an error.
Transforming it to Excel.xlsx was my solution.

Thanks Jeff S

4

Glad you resolved this. I would add that Airtable expects either plain text or text formatted as Markdown when “rich text” is chosen on a column. There are tools to transform HTML to Markdown like https://www.integromat.com/ that can connect everything together. Have a great day!

5

Thanks for the tip. But I wait for the ‘Nobull Block’ from Finsweet and see what that does.

6

@HGWeb Can a file exported from AirTable (without html tags in fields) be imported into Webflow successfully? I’ve had difficulty importing regular text (in a long text AirTable field) into Webflow. It cuts off the content after the first paragraph. Any thoughts on why and how to sync these fields during export/import? Thanks.

7

hey, not sure if you already resolved this, but may be able to help with a tool I’m building called whalesync. it creates a 2-way sync between Airtable and Webflow.