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Hello

 
My department is trying to decide whether to move forward with Airtable or not and the feasibility of the items below would help us decide. Is it possible to do the following in a native airtable form? If so, could someone please tell me the specific steps I should take? I’m currently using the trial version. Unfortunately I can’t use any third party integration but I can use the extensions currently offered within airtable.

1/ Can Airtable auto populates fields whenever a selection is made in another field?

I thought “link to another record” was it but apparently it isn’t.

There are project IDs that the form submitter will choose from a drop-down that are linked to specific tasks, owner names and other values that need to be auto-populated whenever said project ID is selected

 2/ Is there a way to create an automation between my form and main excel spreadsheet in Airtable base where the records being entered by the submitter are automatically merged in my spreadsheet once reviewed and approved and vice versa, where the pre-filled fields in the form can be auto-updated from the spreadsheet? 

3/I’ll need to pre-fill 7 fields. From my reading of the instructions, it looks like I’ll need to create an url with the names of those fields, using specific characters and formulas. Is there more to it?

This is not possible with Airtable’s native forms, but you can get this with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

Fillout is 100% free and if offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, display Airtable lookup fields & Airtable rollup fields & Airtable attachments & formulas on forms, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, create new linked records on a form, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

You will need 3rd-party apps.

#1 is possible natively with linked record fields, but you won’t see the looked up values until after the form is submitted in your base. To see these values show up in real time on the form, you would be required to use Fillout.

#2 can not be done natively, unless you know how to write custom JavaScript code to do all of this for you. However, most people turn to Airtable to avoid writing code. In which case, you would need to use Make to do all of this for you, which is super easy to setup and requires no code at all.

#3 can be done natively. You can use @kuovonne‘s prefilled forms extension to help you with this.

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld


Alright, thank you. Sounds like Airtable won’t work for us.

Hi @Lex-123,

If you're looking for a database app that does all of these things natively (without the need for any 3rd-party apps at all), I would highly recommend looking at Apple’s FileMaker.

I was a Certified FileMaker Developer for nearly 30 years before becoming an Airtable consultant in 2018.

If you'd like to explore the FileMaker path, please feel free to contact me through my website and I can refer you to some amazing FileMaker developers who can help you setup your FileMaker system for you!

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