I have a column that is called Contacts that lives in table Publications. In this column, each cell has one or multiple linked records that can be found in another table called Press & Media Contacts.
It sounds like you want to filter your publications by contacts, but you want to use their ID instead of their name as the filtering criteria.
What you’ll want to do is 3 things:
Create a “RecordID” field in your Contacts table by creating a formula field with the formula: RECORD_ID()
In your Publications table, create a lookup field that looks up this new “RecordID” field from your Contacts table.
Once you have this new lookup field in your Publications table, then you can filter on this lookup field by typing the RecordID into the filter.
Hope this helps! If this solves your problem, could you please mark this comment as the solution to your question? This will help other people who have a similar question in the future. If not, please let me know what additional help you need!