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Some field types including single selects, multiple selects, linked records, and collaborator fields will show “List” or “Record” instead of the values you may be used to seeing in the Airtable grid view. This is consistent with how the Airtable Web API returns information.

To transform linked record fields into human-readable fields via Airtable’s API, you would either need to:

  1. Create a formula field that transforms the linked record into a string of text, like this:
    {Linked Record Field} & ""

    You can also use rollup fields with a similar approach. Lookup fields might work for you too, but those always result in arrays instead of strings of text.

    or 

  2. Make a separate query to the linked table to get the values of the record from there.

Also, I should also mention that you can integrate Airtable with PowerBi in a no-code fashion by using Make’s PowerBi integrations, but you would still need to use one of the approaches above.

Hope this helps!

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


I’ve successfully implemented a script to fetch all records from Airtable, including parameters and pagination. However, I need help specifically with extracting the original records for:

  • Linked records

  • Lookup fields

  • Rollup fields

  • Click records 

Should these solutions be handled on the Power BI side (e.g., data transformation in Power Query) or the Airtable side (e.g., preprocessing via scripts/API)?


Hi,

I think you can try to check ‘cellFormat’ query parameter.
 


I’m not using Web API and Power BI, but I think it works in a following way:
the real value of Linked field is array of linked objects, each holding  ‘name’ of record & ‘id’ of record
In Grid view, you can see string form -  ‘names’ of linked records

In my example, first is real value, second is the string form of value.
 

here is a result:
 



I guess, the ‘cellFormat’ works in a similar way. 

I can’t answer about whether it should be processed on Power BI-side, it depends on how it use received data. 
 


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