I timed 1,200 contact rows last Friday: 42 minutes in Excel with data validation and Flash Fill, versus 58 in our Airtable form with automations and lookups. If anyone’s getting better throughput on a web form, what setup are you using, because I’d love to stop fighting the overcomplicated route.
I got Airtable closer to Excel by pre-filling common fields via the URL and tightening the tab order — most rows became ‘enter, tab, tab, type, enter’ (docs: Prefilling a form via encoded URL | Airtable Support). It’s still slower than Excel when I’m pasting big chunks, but for single-row entry it shaved about 10–15% off for me.
Swapping Airtable’s native form for Fillout and making the form table “dumb” got me close to your 42 minutes for about 1,200 rows. I stripped lookups/formulas from the input table and prefilled hidden linked IDs, then used Fillout’s repeatable section to add 10 contacts per submit — keyboard-only felt like Excel; caveat: long selects still drag unless you allow free text and validate later. If you stick with Airtable, @hazel_dia15’s URL prefill is good, but moving enrichment after insert was the real speed win.
I got Airtable form entry for about 1,200 contacts down to about 45 minutes — close to your “42 minutes” — by using a tiny Tampermonkey userscript that maps Enter to advance, auto-selects last-used options, and reloads a fresh form after submit (https://www.tampermonkey.net). It’s fast but brittle, since a DOM tweak can break it, so I pin a stable form view and keep a quick toggle to run the heavier automations after the batch.