How to show limited single select items based on what is chosen in previous column
I have only just got started with Airtable, and I’m currently on a free account, so I’m not sure if this is doable at all, let alone without upgrading. But I would love to find out if there’s a way to do what I have in mind.
Basically I am creating an income/expense tracker. In one column, I want to choose between Income or Expense. Then, in the next column, I have a list of possible income/expenses listed. If Income is chosen, I’d like only Income items to show up, and the same for Expenses. Is this possible? I can’t seem to get it to work.
Currently I have color coded the Expenses in Red and the Income in Green to make it easy to identify them, but I’d like to simplify it further and keep from having to scroll so much.
I’d love any help. Thanks!
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2025 UPDATE:
No, that is not possible with single-select fields, but you could do that by changing both of your fields into linked record fields, and then you could use Airtable’s dynamic filtering feature.
However, Airtable has made this very complicated to setup, and it has to be setup for your ENTIRE BASE — not just the form itself. So anywhere you see those fields in Airtable, they will have the dynamic behavior attached to it.
You would only need to turn your second field into a linked record field (instead of both fields), and Fillout makes the setup process much easier. (Also, your linked record field can work differently on your Fillout form than how it works in your base.)
Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create PDF files from form submissions, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, 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, 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:
Hi Katie- Though technically what you’re requesting isn’t possible outside of the workarounds presented in the earlier post from today that was referred to, I do think for your use case you could probably make this work with 2 separate fields, as this is actually quite common in a transaction register.
At the very least you could have 2 separate fields for the categories (one for income & one for expense), or you could take it a bit further & have 2 additional separate fields for the amounts. In this way the user would simply use the field(s) that makes sense for the transaction at hand, so dynamic filtering of selectable options wouldn’t be necessary. You could certainly do all the necessary calculations when it comes to the tracking of income/expenses with this approach, albeit with at least one more field than you’re currently using. With some additional formula fields, reports could disregard the duplicate fields & instead present the data in a single column if needed.
Hi Katie- Though technically what you’re requesting isn’t possible outside of the workarounds presented in the earlier post from today that was referred to, I do think for your use case you could probably make this work with 2 separate fields, as this is actually quite common in a transaction register.
At the very least you could have 2 separate fields for the categories (one for income & one for expense), or you could take it a bit further & have 2 additional separate fields for the amounts. In this way the user would simply use the field(s) that makes sense for the transaction at hand, so dynamic filtering of selectable options wouldn’t be necessary. You could certainly do all the necessary calculations when it comes to the tracking of income/expenses with this approach, albeit with at least one more field than you’re currently using. With some additional formula fields, reports could disregard the duplicate fields & instead present the data in a single column if needed.
Thanks for this. That’s basically what I’m doing now with two separate fields. I was hoping to be able to limit it to one, but I see that’s not currently possible. I appreciate your detailed response, however!
This is not possible in Airtable — check out this other thread from today, and be sure to email support@airtable.com to request this much-needed & often-requested feature:
Thank you. That’s basically what I thought through googling, but I wondered if I had missed something. I will definitely email and hope one day this functionality is added. It seems a rather basic feature that is being overlooked. Thanks for the help!
