Base Design

Hi dear community, I am a developer, quite experienced at using Airtable, and love best practices. I never really had a need to post a message as the documentation and this forum are already full of precious infos. Thanks you all for that, especially members like @Bill.French - are you french by the way? :winking_face: My problem concerns big structures for bases. It is not really a matter of slow performances, but rather a matter of human understanding and keeping a clean database. I just got on a new project as a Product Manager, the main base contains 32 tables and some tables have almost 200 fields. Obviously everything has been built through small fixes here and there, and there is no naming convention. I have a lot to learn about that and I am now looking into topics like this : database - Relational table naming convention - Stack Overflow Problem I have : Do these naming conventions fit an airtable usage ? Most of the people who are going to use my base are not developers. I

Good Afternoon! I am a Learning Design Coach for a public K-12 virtual school. I am attempting to move our registration process over to Airtable. Is there a way using filters (or any other way) to create views based on alpha order. So I need a view that shows all of the records in which a student last name starts with an A as well as all other letters up to L. Thanks ahead of time! Dan

I have a field that has a drop down in each cell. I want to create a formula that will count the total number of names selected in the field. Here’s a screenshot of the field. This formula for the screenshot above would show a total count of 7. I also want to be able to create a formula that counts the number of each possible selection. The results of this formula would show: Carlo - 2 Zach - 2 Mark - 2 Ryan - 1 Thank you in advance for your help!

Hi there. We use an excel spreadsheet to manage monthly sales targets for our partners/employees. In Excel we are able to put in targets by month/quarter and then also put in the actual data so we can understand target vs actual. I’ve been trying to figure out how to structure my base to do this for the last week and I can’t seem to work it out. We have periods of time that we need to track these figures (e.g. January, February, Q1 etc) but also within that we have different types of targets. So we have a software and a hardware target. But it also needs to be tracked per partner/employee. Any ideas very welcome! Appreciate Airtable isn’t Excel but we use Airtable for everything in our business so we are trying to get this moved over as well. Thanks Dan

I would like to, in a single Base, create a list of Projects with associated Tasks and their assignments, status, and status dates - then copy that Project and its related Tasks for use on a new Project. We would like to track multiple Projects, which have similar sets of Tasks, without having to create and link all of the Tasks every new Project. They cannot share the same Tasks, as each Task (for each Project) requires its own assignment, status, and dates. Shared Tasks do not provide this. I have reviewed the documentation and have not found a way to do this in Airtable. Is it possible? Thank you in-advance.

Hi there, I am working on an alien database project in Airtable that needs to track how each alien’s Lead Researcher has changed over time. I have a table of “Aliens” listing all their relevant traits (home planet, native gravity, atmosphere, diet, etc.) and I have a table of “Lead Researchers” listing all their relevant traits (name, major phobias, favorite color, etc.) I have a field that tells me who the current “Lead Researcher” is for each alien. Each Lead Researcher is the lead for several (between 20-40) different aliens. When the Lead Researchers change, we simply update this field. Easy peasy. However, I also need a way to see “Researcher History” for each alien, including the dates that the lead researcher started and ended with that subject. I know that Airtable tracks changes, but I am looking to have this in my actual data as part of the base. I can imagine building out fields to make the table wider with something like this: Previous Researcher 1 Start Date 1 End Date 1

Hi there :slightly_smiling_face: I have a table that lists “People” in different categories (by role) and includes contact information for all of those people. For Department heads, I would like the email address of their Executive Assistant to populate in a field in their record. So I would like Bam Bam Rubble’s email address to show up in the box circled in green: I have a second field of “Organizations” that these link to that looks like this: Is it possible to do what I want and have Exec Assist emails appear in the records of their department heads? Thanks so much!

Hi all, I use the phone field a lot in my tabs but I don’t live in the US and so what I get is a very odd and inconvenient formatting of my clients phone numbers. For instance I want to call a french number which should be formatted as follow : 06 01 23 45 67 it shows in Airtable as (060) 123 45-67. When I’m using the app on my phone I can just click but I’m also making a lot of calls from my office. So I manually type numbers and the formatting is very distracting and I always have to double check before making a call. My collaborators have the same problem and while it doesn’t look like much it adds up to a lot of lost time. Is there a way to change the number formatting ? My iphone does it automatically as I type numbers in so i’m a bit surprised that I can’t do it on Airtable. Thanks for your input.

Hi, I have assigned different tasks to employees. Each task has a start and end data and workload. The real workload will of course then vary by time. I can always calculate the total workload for all tasks. But that is theorectical since not all tasks are ongoing simultaneously., Is there some way of showing me the real floating workload profile? Like for example the timeline with the actual varying workload. “This is the workload profile based on the allocated tasks”. The basic need is to get the workload profile for planning purpose.

Hi, Airtable community! Our company teaches glass classes, and we have been utilizing Airtable for our schedule for going on two years now. We love the platform. That said, we would love to take Airtable to the next level for us, but I’m a little perplexed on the right way to go about it or even all the options that might be open to us. I am not opposed to hiring a developer, but I need a scope of work. :slightly_smiling_face: We teach several different classes per day, and we have multiple members within a party. For example, our most common is for two people to signup together or to have three people signup separately but all within the same party. Therefore, each class can have up to 16 individuals, typically in groups of 2 or 3. We utilize WordPress, WooCommerce, and Events Calendar Pro for our students to schedule online. Currently, we manually enter the information to Airtable from the WooCommerce store email. We also take email and phone reservations. We use a printed version

I’ve encountered the following situation a few times when trying to cross-reference information from multiple sources. In short, I’m creating a row for each source, with the source name in one of the columns. Then I can compare the data from multiple sources. I now want to set one row as definitive or authoritative. For example, a bibliography. My base contains lists of books taken from multiple sources. Some books are mentioned several times. This is useful, as I can compare e.g. source notes. However, I want to mark one of the rows as the definitive entry. At the moment, my approach is to have a column with a checkbox called ‘Duplicate’. I am hiding these ‘duplicates’ in an Airtable view. I’m not sure this is the best approach. I could perhaps tick the ‘best’ version and send that to another table within the base? Where I can amend the data? The desired outcome from the bibliography example is a table with a consolidated, clean list of books. I should mention also that the aim is to

Hi There, I am responsible for reporting the number of open projects per month that my team works on and breaks it down into four project categories. I am trying to build a Base that does the following: Master Table that lists all projects and assigns each project a category A form that feeds into a table that each employee records daily projects worked on as multiselect linked record An automated way to count the number of projects that were touched in any given month by both total project and breaks out into the four project categories above. I have built point 1 + 2 without issue, but I am having trouble with point 3. Any help would be appreciated. Best, Colin

Hey everyone! I am trying to learn best practices for how to link tables. My goal is to create a Data structure that will allow me to filter the records in a table based on features that are linked to that record in the same table. I created separate tables for each feature that are linked to the table that I’m trying to filter. Questions This creates an array of values as a result in each table that is linked even thought the table for the feature itself is a list, not an array. Is this going to cause problems down the road? when I create linked features in the tables, it automatically creates another column that references this link. Why does Airtable do this? Should I delete this extra column? Thank you!

I need a deep dive course in Airtable. My immediate task is to Take a client list (that is imported from google forms) Then add jobs to that client Then have a another table in the client base that is materials Then be able to make a shopping list for each job By going to the material list and multi selecting the job (which is been rolled up from the jobs field in the client table) And while we’re at it, I need to record each site visit per job per person so it would be great to have the multi select list available for the after action report Currently using an outliner or a moleskin notebook harhar Seriously I would pay somebody to tutor me Thanks

Hello Airtable experts, I’m trying to solve the issue below and tried with links etc but my scripting knowledge is limited. In excel I have multiple columns. Date the student is set to graduate, today’s date. The difference between the two that calculates the ROW. And the message pulled from the second student tab. Is there a way to do this within Airtable to auto populate each day with the correct messages from the second table?

anywork around for this SUGGESTION/REQUEST: Please provide a bit better formatting for Long (Rich) Text fields

Essentially, I have a custom view – “January '22” – it has a standard # of records that I’m going to use in “February '22” as well, except all the entries in the fields will change. I can’t for the life of me figure this out, as I know I have to actually duplicate all the records (as if I duplicate the view, it won’t create new records). Has anyone solved this?

Hi Airtablers, I’m really stumped here. My base was working great until I needed to add a scoring system where I want to make a few calculations, but the table linking is just not cooperating with me. I have 6 main tables here: Networks (linked to Devices) Devices (linked to Locations, Vendors, Tickets, and Networks) Vendors (linked to Devices and Vendor Scoring) Locations (linked to Devices) Tickets (linked to Devices) Vendor Scoring (linked to Vendors) I’m trying to create a scoring system of each Vendor by looking at their total number of tickets and the average time to close/repair a ticket. But I can’t seem to find a way to pull this information via the linking schema I have set up here. I thought about scrapping the Vendor Scoring table altogether and just do the calculations in the Vendors table, but I’ve had no luck there either. I can’t even get the CountA formulas to properly tell me how many tickets each vendor has total (let alone open vs. closed). See screenshots b

I would like to ask the community for input and ideas on a problem I’m facing, which is: How can I track business travel expenses in a AirTable Interface (from Table: “Trip Tracker”) using receipt data from a different table (Table: “Expense Tracker”)? The table “Trip Tracker” is a kind of dashboard that lets me track the status of multiple items for every trip (dates, host, invoice amount, team members, etc.). I created an Airtable Interface that is very, very useful for me to keep status on trip details in a helpful presentation. The table “Expense Tracker” is going to have one record per expense, and keep track of all of the expenses for each trip so I can reimburse people, and bill clients. I would like to populate the “Trip Tracker” interface with a table (i.e., grid) of all of the expenses for the relevant trip from the “Expense Tracker” table. Ideally, this would be a grid of the expenses with rows and columns displaying from “Expense Tracker” table within the “Trip Tracker” in

I have one Patient table with fields for Email address, Patient name, and Contact info. I also have a Visit Detail table that I am trying to link to the Patient table by matching the Email address, then looking up the matching Patient name. The problem I am encountering is that when I attempt in the Visit Detail table to make the link in the “Customize Field Type” of the Email Address or Patient name of the Visit Detail table, the drop-down list of tables to select from does not include the Patient table. In both tables, the Email Address field uses field type of “email”. Patient name is single text in both tables.

Hi I am able to do this manually - by creating a field with a formula, but I am working on a 5 year project so making 60 columns and typing in the formula each time is a little tedious! So I wondered if anyone had any clever ideas? Essentially, I have a table of transactions - with a field showing which year / month (yyyy-mm) the invoice will be paid. I need to show our Finance Director a cash flow report (very easy in Excel!) with a column for each month over the next 5 years. I can create a field / column, with a Lookup field, only showing transactions for the month (the field name would be Jan-22 for example) - but that would take a while to set up - as mentioned above - 60 columns / formulas to manually enter - even with duplicating the field it would take a while. I’d also need to show cumulative total (so the total of all spends up to that specific month) Any ideas? Thanks, Andrew

I have the following initial situation The opening hours of my business are defined from Monday to Saturday and vary in length. Furthermore, more than 10 people work in my company, with whom I have to cover the opening hours. This means that each employee has different working hours per weekday. These working hours differ from employee to employee. So the absences of my employees are not calculated in days but in hours. E.g.: Employee 1: Monday 8 hours, Tuesday off, Wednesday 8.5 hours, etc. Employee 2: Monday 9 hours, Tuesday 7.5 hours, Wednesday off, etc. What I would like to achieve now: By means of a form, an employee should be able to request “absences”. He should enter in one or more datepickers the dates on which he would like to be free. Once the form is submitted, a new “vacation entry” should appear in Airtable, which, based on the example above, displays the correct number of hours for the employee for the day in question, and this is then deducted from a predefined balance

I’m wondering if there is a useful airtable app or organization strategy that could be used for freezer mapping and sample organization? It would be similiar to an inventory catalog but would need to track multiple freezers/shelves/racks.

Hello, were looking for someone that can look over our database and see if there is a better way to link tables, lookup information, and get the most use out if. We feel like we have inconsistent linking and double entries on several things. It’s a CRM for a small business offering two different types of services, which are all conducted by appointment. We attached the setup as it is now, - disregard the 1-1. 1-m, lines etc. they are inaccurate, but the Tables are how they are currently setup. Thanks in advance!

Is there a way to enter in the date then move to the time portion of the field using only the keyboard. Right now, I can enter the date but I have to use the mouse to move to the time portion of the field.