Linked Table cuts off my data

Hey, I stumped the community on my first try. Ha!

Welcome to the Airtable community!

I’m sorry that you didn’t get an answer to your question. It may be that people had a difficult time picturing your scenario. It might help if you posted some screen shots to go with your explanation.

Airtable also handles links between records differently from other database programs, so that might be causing some of the issues.

Adding screenshot, as suggested!

I’d like to link the column “Database ranking” to another table. But when I do so, it cuts off everything on the second and following lines. So the cell would just read 1: Google. It does this on any column that would regularly be set to “long text” field type.

There are a couple of issues here.

1. Linking in Airtable is on a record base. You cannot link to a specific column. You can link to a record, and then have a lookup or rollup of the specific column.

2. It may just be a display issue. Normally rows are sized to show only one line of text, even though there may be multiple lines of text in the field. The additional text is there, as you can see in your screen capture. In order to see the additional text you need to expand the cell or record. You can also adjust the row height. Unfortunately there is no way to have rows auto adjust their heights to show all contents.

Thanks for the reply! If I change the field type on the Database ranking column to link to another table and have it create a new table, it definitely cuts off my data. Here’s what that looks like. I even clicked on fields just to make sure that the data wasn’t hiding in the pop up view. So, before it was a linked column, lines 1 and 3 were completely different, but once it’s linked data, they are the same and now my data’s no longer accurate. Again, this happens anytime the data is more than one line long, so it’s a pretty consistent occurrence.

Thank you for the additional information. I didn’t realize that the problem was when you were converting a long text field to a linked record field.

When you convert a field into a linked record field, Airtable has to guess how you want to match up cell values with rows in the linked table.

Are you creating a brand new table when you make the conversion, or are you linking to an existing table? I have better success at field conversions when the linked table already exists and the original text field has comma separated values that exactly match the records in the linked table.

I’ve done it both ways–both trying to match and creating a new table–no success either way.

Have you tried converting the new line characters into commas?

Create a new formula field that replaces the new line characters with commas.

SUBSTITUTE({original field}, "\n", ", ")

Then convert the formula field into a linked record field.

Of course, this won’t work if your existing text already includes commas, but I don’t see commas in your sample data.