Struggling with linking: help!

[Leslie_Nicoll]

Linking just does not make sense to me so help! I am planning a conference. I have one table for “Registration” which pulls information from Wufoo (using a Zap) when someone registers for the conference: name, address, date they registered, and if they submitted an abstract for presentation. Right now there are 17 people registered.

The next table is the list of abstracts submitted: presenter name, title of abstract, content, and if it has been accepted for presentation. A total of 79 abstracts were submitted. All abstract presenters who are accepted MUST register for the conference by February 1. If they don’t, they won’t be included on the program to present.

Acceptance letters will be going out tomorrow. I imagine over the next 2 weeks there will be a flood of registrations as people accept to present. I would like the registration table and abstract table to LINK so that we can easily keep track of who has submitted an abstract and subsequently registered for the conference so we know they will be attending and presenting.

Of the 17 people currently registered, 9 submitted abstracts and 8 did not.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!
Leslie

[Kamille_Parks]

Your registration form should ask what the name of the abstract they submitted is, that will allow you to link your Registrations table to your Abstracts table.

Since you’re pulling info from an outside form, your form field will likely be a regular text box but your Airtable field will be a Link to Another Record field type.

[Leslie_Nicoll]

Thank you for replying. The abstract names are long and people would very likely not write the whole name correctly, so they wouldn’t match.

However, the registration form does have the statement: I submitted an abstract for presentation with the choices Yes, No, or Maybe/Not sure. So is this the field I should link on?

[Kamille_Parks]

Leslie_Nicoll:

Yes, No, or Maybe/Not sure

That’s not specific enough to link to the other field/table. When people submit an abstract, you can give them a confirmation code of sorts and make it the primary field in the Abstract table. Then, in your registration form you could ask for an abstract code and that field will be the link.

[Devlyn_MacKinno]

In your registration table, you have a name of a person, and in the abstract table you have a name of a person. Link the presenter name with the registration list (from the presenter table) which should automagically create a field of abstracts in their record.

I have a similar set up. I have members of a club who are also presenters and I have them linked to my “classes” table which automagically created a list of the classes they are teaching. Then I use lookups to fill in other information from the “classes” table.

Use views in your registration table to sort out your presenters using the option they selected as to whether they submitted an abstract. Then in your abstract table, limit the options of presenters to just that view and link the two together.

If an abstract is accepted, use that to create another view of your presenters along with if you’ve sent out the acceptance and whether they are registered, etc. You can also use this information to populate form letters using the Page Designer block.

For reference, I used the template for school groups as my starting point.

[Devlyn_MacKinno]

Oh and just to clarify: The field you link has to have the same info from either side and one side has to be the primary field on the table. That’s why I say link from the abstract table TO the registration table on the Presenter Name field since this field is already existing.

You can grab lots of other information back and forth after that using rollups and lookups and other field types. You DO NOT have to make more than one link from table A to table B. These were things that were not clear to me when I started (struggling) with linking and I figured out over time.

[Leslie_Nicoll]

Thank you, Devlyn! This is very helpful. I appreciate your answers!