Any Way to Look Through One Field for a Match and Link to Another Record?

[Christopher_Can]

I suppose this is a long shot, but I have data coming in from Quickbooks and one column has data that comes in from Zapier as “Client Name:Project Number”. What I would ideally want to do is have some function that looks at that column, and if it sees the “Project Number” that matches an entry in the tab where I keep all my project data, it would automatically link to the corresponding record.

As it is now, I have the field with “Client Name:Project Number” and right next to it a link to my Project Number record. So I just manually look at the Project Number that gets imported in, then link the corresponding record. Not a huge deal, but I’m wondering if there’s an automated way.

[Justin_Barrett]

To extract the project number, you’d use a formula, but there aren’t currently any formula functions that can create links to records in other tables. Formulas can’t even view other tables. I can definitely see the usefulness of the idea, though. Perhaps add a request in the Product Suggestions category.

[Kamille_Parks]

If you follow Justin’s suggestion and use a formula to isolate the project number you can add a Link to Another Record field next to it and just copy and paste the whole column, assuming the {project number} is the primary field in your [Projects] table

how are you importing from Quickbooks, is it a Zappier/Integromat integration? If so, I’m usually able to separate source data into the proper Airtable field within the integration setup.

[Christopher_Can]

I did just cook up a modification to my Zapier import of the QB data that does what I want. It creates the new record from QBO, then searches one table for the value I need, searches the second table for the newly-added record, then adds the entry needed if there’s any match.

Figured I would have to turn to Zapier, but I wanted to check on any built-in possibilities first.