Seeing who else is in the table

Two people working on one table used to find each other by accident: a cell you were about to type in changed, and that was the first you knew anyone else was there. Now you can see them. A cell someone else has selected wears a ring in their color and their face in the corner, and the end of the view bar shows who is in the table at all.

The mark on the cell

When a colleague selects a cell, that cell gets:

• A ring in their color — the same color their face wears in member cells, the picker and the share dialog, so a ring you have seen before belongs to someone you already recognize.
• Their face, in the top-right corner of the cell. Their photo if they have set one on their profile, the initial circle otherwise.
• A light wash across the cell, and only while they are actually typing — a cell editor open, right now. A selected cell has a ring; a cell being edited has a ring and a tint. That is the difference between "she's looking at this" and "don't start typing here".

Your own selection is unchanged, and it never carries a face. Nothing marked this way is ever you.

The faces at the end of the bar

At the right end of the view bar, past the search, is a row of the people who have this table open. Hover it and it names them.

Two things about the list. One face per person, however many tabs they have open — your colleague with the table open twice is one colleague. And when nobody else is here the row isn't there at all, which is most of the time; it is a strip that appears when it has something to say, not a permanent empty box.

Anyone who can open the table appears in it, viewers included. Reading a table is being in it.

Where the cell marks come from, and where they stop

A cursor is a claim about a spot on a screen, so it is only shown to people looking at the same screen:

• Same view — a colleague reading the same table through a different view has their own filters, sorts and hidden fields, so their row three is not your row three. They still appear in the face row; their cell mark doesn't cross between views.
• A row you have actually loaded — the grid pages records in as you scroll, and a mark on a record you haven't reached yet has nowhere to be drawn. Scroll to it and it's there.
• An ungrouped grid. Every layout shows the face row — board, calendar, gallery, and a grid you have grouped. The cell mark is drawn on the grid's own canvas, so a grouped grid, which draws its rows another way, shows the faces without the marks.

It is a hint, not a lock

Nothing about this stops anyone doing anything. Two people can select the same cell, and both can type in it. What protects the data is the conflict check underneath — every edit carries proof of what its author was looking at, and the write that would overwrite something unseen is refused out loud. Presence is there so you collide less often; the token is there for when you collide anyway.

So if the marks were ever to lag or go missing — a phone that lost signal, a laptop that slept — nothing is at risk. You are back to the product as it was last month, which was already safe.

Nothing is written down

None of this is stored. A seat exists for exactly as long as your tab is open: close it, navigate away, or switch tables and it is gone from everyone else's screen at once. There is no history of who looked at what, nothing to export, and nothing an administrator can go back and read. A connection that ends badly — a slept laptop, a dropped network — clears itself within about a minute, when the heartbeat behind it stops arriving.

The one thing worth knowing plainly: while you have a table open, the other members of that database can see that you are there and which cell you have selected. That is the whole of it, it lasts as long as the tab does, and it reaches nobody outside that database's members. The privacy page says the same thing in the same words.

The questions people ask

Does it show what they're typing before they save it? No. You see that a cell is occupied and by whom, never a character of it. The value arrives when they commit it, through the ordinary live sync every change uses.

Can I hide myself? Not today. Presence is symmetric by design — everyone who can see the roster is in it — and a one-way mirror is a feature we would rather not have built at all than build halfway.

Does it work over the API? No, and it isn't meant to. An API key writing records is not sitting in a table looking at a cell, so nothing about it appears here. What an integration changed shows up the way it always has: in the grid, and in the record's Activity.

Does it slow the table down? No. It rides the connection your table already keeps open for live sync, so it costs no extra connection and nothing at all while your cursor is still. Moving the cursor sends a small message, at most twice a second no matter how fast you move.