How can I transform ‘List’ or ‘Record’ field types from Airtable into readable values in Power BI, especially for selects, linked records, and collaborator fields?

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!

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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.