Help needed: struggling to filter records from a lookup field in Airtable

Hi everyone! 👋

I’m fairly new to Airtable and I’ve been trying to build a base where I can filter records based on values in a lookup field, but I can’t seem to get it working the way I want. I’ve read some community posts and tried a few different approaches, but I’m still stuck — so I thought I’d ask here for guidance. 😊

Here’s what I’m trying to do:

🔹 Base setup

• Table A: Projects
  – Contains project names and related client.

• Table B: Clients
  – Contains client details + a lookup field in Table A.

• In Table A, I have a lookup field that pulls the client industry from Table B.

🔹 Goal
I want to filter Table A to only show projects where the client’s industry includes the word “Technology”.

I’ve tried:

• Setting a view filter in Table A → Lookup Industry contains “Technology”

• Creating a formula field referencing the lookup

• Adding a rollup field

But none of these filters ever show the expected records when I test it. I suspect I might be misunderstanding how lookup values behave in filters vs formulas.

Questions

1. Is there a recommended way to filter on a lookup field like this?

2. Should I use a formula that converts the lookup to text first?

3. Are there limitations with lookup values in Airtable filters that I should know about?

Thanks so much in advance! Any suggestions or sample formulas that might help would be greatly appreciated. 🙏