📣 Launching Today: Linked Records in Synced Tables! 🔗

[Evan_Purcell]

Hi Airtable Community,

We are excited to announce that starting today, we are rolling out support for linked records in synced tables! 🎉 

This highly-requested feature allows you to establish and maintain links between records in different tables, even when those tables are later synced across bases. With this feature, you’ll also be able to edit connections across records leveraging two-way sync!

Why is this a game-changer?

• Start syncing linked data (and migrate over existing syncs!) with just a few clicks.  No more relying on automations or field customization to connect linked records in syncs. Now, you’ll have first-class reliability out of the box.
• Work with synced linked data like it’s local to your app. The days of hopping across bases to make edits to linked data are over – you can now change both which records are connected and the cell values within those records, right in place.
• Maintain full data fidelity as workflows scale. Preserve the context and relationships of your data no matter where it's synced, ensuring that everyone is working with comprehensive, interconnected data at all times.

With linked records in synced tables, you can now effortlessly keep your data connected and in context across your entire organization. This enables smoother collaboration, better-informed decisions, and greater alignment around a single source of truth.

Where can I learn more? 

Check out this support article to get more info on how to get started and what the key limitations are.

When is this rolling out?

The rollout process is beginning today and will continue over the next few weeks. It will be automatically available for all users on Teams plans and above once fully released. 

We want your feedback!

As always, your input is invaluable to us. Please share your thoughts, questions, and ideas about this new capability in the comments. We're excited to see how you leverage linked records in your synced tables to do even greater things with Airtable!

Best,

Evan Purcell, Product Manager (on behalf of the Airtable team)

[bmcad1116]

Is there a demo video of this feature?

[Adam_White]

Hi there! 

I've been tinkering with this feature as it's something I've been hoping for for years.

I believe it's still rolling out to all of our bases so I can't tell if this is a limitation or a glitch but I do have a question to understand how this works across multiple bases, especially with something like library data. 

If I understand if correctly, data links can only be shared if the data originates from the same source base. 

For example-I have a dataset of projects which is linked to a data library table of quarters.

I have another table of reports that also links to the same quarters from the library. I also have projects shared in reporting too--but if I try to share the quarter linked record field I need to add another linked view. It seems this feature cannot link these two tables to the same table of identical data?

This makes sense based on the requirement to have an associated view for each linked record sync, but I'd hope there's a plan to allow for this connection soon. 

Thanks!

[dm-wa]

Hi there!

First of all - Great! We were looking forward to this for a long time and had to workaround this with automations.

As @Adam_White wrote the current feature scope is nice for smaller setups (e. g. with 2 bases or little linking between bases) but for any setup with multiple bases linking to the same record (e. g. verified data sets) you really want to link to the same record (== same table) and not have multiple tables with the same data.

Right now the feature is not usable for us until this is possible and we will stay with our automations for now. We hope this on the roadmap! It looks promising.

[Joseph_Roza]

As soon as I need something, you guys add it.

What a powerful feature. Thank you so much!

[Kameli_Kyttyrai]

Ummm... I've been using this for years already. I have following stucture:
Main base (accessible only for me) with:
-Customers
-Projects
-Work time records (Synced from secondary base)
-Billing

Secondary base (accessible by employees as well) with
-Projects (Synced from Main base)
-Work time records (created here)

Every work record has a link to a project. And it has been working well for years. Link selected for project in Secondary base syncs back to Main base as linked record to project there. Great!

However - now when I tried to recreate this configuration it doesn't seem to work anymore! What's wrong? (better not to mess with it to keep it working still!)

[Kameli_Kyttyrai]

Nope - It doesn't work anymore.

If I try to make this kind of configuration again, it wants to sync a copy of "projects"-table to the Main base or it will change the link to a record into a text field.

Then the main base will have two instances of "Project"s and links are broken to the original "Projects"-table.

This needs to be fixed!