Debulk List of Records

[Marika_Vallier]

Hi everyone!

I am trying to have an automated Slack message sent every Friday to notify about the leaves planned for the coming week.

However, my current automation (trigger: at scheduled time + action: find record + Slack: send a message) uses the List of Records which ends up very bulky and unpractical for the team.

Ideally, it would create a list like:

• @Marketing-team: no leave
• @Hardware-team: Joe (2 days, Mon-Tue, Leni (1 day, Mon)
• etc...

Could anyone provide some ideas on how to make this announcement more digest?

Looking forward to your solutions and grateful for anyone's time looking into this!

[Dimitris_Goudis]

Hey @Marika_Vallier, 

Based on what you described, your issue is that you prefer the list data to be converted into text like your example right? In that case, I would recommend using the AI action to generate your result and simply post it in slack action. 

Would that work for you? Very happy to have a deeper discussion about your case. 

Thanks
Dimitris Goudis

[ScottWorld]

@Marika_Vallier 

In Airtable, you can summarize data by using lookup fields or rollup fields.

So I would make sure that each of your leave records is linked to a department record in another table, and then you can create a lookup field in the department table to lookup the leaves into the department table.

Then, you can send your Slack notifications from the department table instead of the leaves table.

Otherwise, if you want to get into advanced grouping and summarizing from the leaves table, you can either write your own custom JavaScripts or you can use Make’s text aggregator and send your Slack notifications using Make’s Slack integrations.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one way that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

I also give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances here.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

[Marika_Vallier]

Hi @ScottWorld !

Thanks for your reply. The leave is linked to a staff record which itself is linked to a team record. So I imagine this connection may make it impossible to rollup/lookup team leave directly?

Also, I only want to show the leave from the coming week. Any way that could be arranged?