How to Open Prefilled Forms from Your Airtable Interface

You manage your hospital cases in Airtable using an Interface that shows all your records in a Kanban view. Each case includes key details and links to related records like patients or activities.

Now you want to make it faster to log new activities from within the Interface itself. Ideally, you would like to have a button on each case record that opens a form for adding a new Activity with the Case field and the Patient field already filled in automatically.

So how can you set this up in Airtable?

Use an Airtable Formula or Button

One simple way is to add a Button or Formula field to your Cases table. Each record can include a dynamic link that opens your Interface Form with prefilled values.

To do this, you need to build a URL formula that includes the form’s base link and appends Airtable’s prefill_ parameters.

For example:

"https://airtable.com/yourFormID?prefill_Case=" & Case

This URL automatically opens your form and preselects the current Case record. You can expand the same formula to include other fields such as the linked Patient or any checkbox fields you want prefilled.

When you click the button in your Interface, it opens the form with those prefilled values ready to go.

Use Fillout

If you prefer a more powerful setup, you can use Fillout forms connected to your Airtable base.

You can prefill your Fillout form in two ways. The first is by using URL parameters, where you pass details such as the Case ID or Patient name directly in the form URL, just like you would in Airtable.

The second method is Pre-fetch records, which lets Fillout look up information from Airtable before the form loads. This ensures that all the relevant fields are pre-populated right away.

I prefer using Fillout over Airtable’s native forms because it offers hundreds of additional features such as updating existing records, sending a copy of the filled form to respondents, and much more.

Whether you stick with Airtable’s built-in forms or switch to Fillout, adding prefilled form links to your Interface is one of the easiest ways to achieve this.