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Is there any support in Airtable for updating formulas when referenced fields are renamed? Alternatively a way to know what formula fields a given field in would be useful to know so it can be manually updated.

The problem is when you have a lot of fields and want to rename them you don’t know what formulas will break somewhere by doing so.

Some kind of ‘column id’ concept would be useful in Airtable (also in the API) to prevent it being so brittle around column names.

Welcome to the community, @Julian_Keenaghan! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: When you rename a field, Airtable automatically updates any formulas that use that field. Nothing will break. Airtable actually stores field references in formulas using an internal field ID that’s not based on the field label, which is why renaming doesn’t cause any problems.

Welcome to the community, @Julian_Keenaghan! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: When you rename a field, Airtable automatically updates any formulas that use that field. Nothing will break. Airtable actually stores field references in formulas using an internal field ID that’s not based on the field label, which is why renaming doesn’t cause any problems.


Thanks Justin, that’s good to know.

I realised the main issue I was actually having was that options in Select fields that were referenced in formulas were breaking when they were changed. I assume they’re not supposed to update automatically?

Thanks Justin, that’s good to know.

I realised the main issue I was actually having was that options in Select fields that were referenced in formulas were breaking when they were changed. I assume they’re not supposed to update automatically?


Correct. When a formula gets data from a select field (single or multiple), Airtable converts the chosen value(s) into a string (automatically comma-separated in the case of a multiple-select field). You’re not directly interacting with the internal data structure that Airtable uses to store the item(s).

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