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Creating Contact Records with information that populates in multiple tables

  • July 19, 2019
  • 6 replies
  • 112 views
S

Greetings-

I’m relatively new to Airtable so I may not use the right jargon!

I have records of many Contacts with typical fields like First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone. Then I made a separate Table for City and another separate Table for States. So in the Records it says City +Link to a Record from Cities and State +Link to a Record from States.

Then I have different Tables with different configurations of Contacts where I want to see all this information including their City/State. Sometimes the same person will be on multiple Tables. How do I get all their contact info that I’d like to see to automatically populate in the different columns?? Right now - even if my City and State columns are set up on the Table and linked back to their original Tables it wants to me to fill the information back in every time.

How do I better navigate this?
Thank you!

    6 replies

    A
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    • AlliAlosa
    • Inspiring
    • July 19, 2019

    The most straight forward way to do this is to use Lookup fields. Point the field to the table holding your Contacts and then select the field that you want to show up on your table.

    If you want the city and state to show up in the same column, add a field to your Contacts table with a formula like…

    {City} & ", " & {State}

    Then point the lookup field to that new field.

    Hope this helps!

    S
    • Sarah_Goodwin
    • Author
    • New Participant
    • July 19, 2019

    The most straight forward way to do this is to use Lookup fields. Point the field to the table holding your Contacts and then select the field that you want to show up on your table.

    If you want the city and state to show up in the same column, add a field to your Contacts table with a formula like…

    {City} & ", " & {State}

    Then point the lookup field to that new field.

    Hope this helps!


    Ahh!

    This helps so much. Thank you!

    One other question: if I want the contacts name to be in the first column of my table I can’t do that, right? Because you can never link Column A for some reason? And I can’t hide that column? So I would just start everything to the right one column?

    A
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    • AlliAlosa
    • Inspiring
    • July 19, 2019

    Ahh!

    This helps so much. Thank you!

    One other question: if I want the contacts name to be in the first column of my table I can’t do that, right? Because you can never link Column A for some reason? And I can’t hide that column? So I would just start everything to the right one column?


    Excellent, you’re welcome! And yes, you’re correct - you can’t link or hide the primary field. However, you can make it into a formula. You could use a formula like…

    {Field Linked to Contact} & " Table Description"

    Doing this allows the name of the person to automatically appear in the primary field. Replace “Table Description” with with whatever information you’d like; i.e. plain text or a reference to another field in the table. :slightly_smiling_face:

    S
    • Sarah_Goodwin
    • Author
    • New Participant
    • July 19, 2019

    Excellent, you’re welcome! And yes, you’re correct - you can’t link or hide the primary field. However, you can make it into a formula. You could use a formula like…

    {Field Linked to Contact} & " Table Description"

    Doing this allows the name of the person to automatically appear in the primary field. Replace “Table Description” with with whatever information you’d like; i.e. plain text or a reference to another field in the table. :slightly_smiling_face:


    Ohh OK. But when I do {Field Linked to …} It only allows me to enter a field that’s ALREADY in that Table. I want to be able to grab the info from another Table (Contacts) on the base. Is that possible?

    A
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    • AlliAlosa
    • Inspiring
    • July 19, 2019

    Ohh OK. But when I do {Field Linked to …} It only allows me to enter a field that’s ALREADY in that Table. I want to be able to grab the info from another Table (Contacts) on the base. Is that possible?


    I should have mentioned, you’ll also want to replace {Field Linked to…} with the name of your field :slightly_smiling_face: But it sounds like you don’t have a field with the contacts name in it on that table.

    The Contacts table has to either be linked to the table in question (in which case, just reference that field), OR to a table that is linked to the table in question.

    In the latter situation, use a lookup field (or a rollup field… which you may need depending on your use case), to pull the contact’s name into this table, then reference that field name in your primary field.

    I hope that makes sense. If it doesn’t, I can explain better with a little more info on the end goal of the base :slightly_smiling_face:

    S
    • Sarah_Goodwin
    • Author
    • New Participant
    • July 23, 2019

    I should have mentioned, you’ll also want to replace {Field Linked to…} with the name of your field :slightly_smiling_face: But it sounds like you don’t have a field with the contacts name in it on that table.

    The Contacts table has to either be linked to the table in question (in which case, just reference that field), OR to a table that is linked to the table in question.

    In the latter situation, use a lookup field (or a rollup field… which you may need depending on your use case), to pull the contact’s name into this table, then reference that field name in your primary field.

    I hope that makes sense. If it doesn’t, I can explain better with a little more info on the end goal of the base :slightly_smiling_face:


    Thank you for your help!

    I’m not sure I’m doing things the most efficient way but I’ve at least got everything working for the moment!

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