Unfortunately, Airtable’s Automations feature doesn’t work in the way that the vast majority of us (maybe ALL of us?) would expect it to work.

See my comments here:

That’s all good and well, but the quoted text from the help explicitly tells me it should work.

So it’s not about expectations, it’s not working as advertised. Right?

Thinking about this some more, you can update a set of records, as long as you only want to update a parent table.

Talking with support now to clear this up.

Yeah, that article is wrong… or at best extremely misleading. Airtable should fix that article.

Right, which is exactly what I outlined in my other message that I linked to above.

Unfortunately, the only thing we can effectively do with the “Find Records” action is copy-and-paste the group of record ID’s into a linked record field. Ostensibly to update the parent record.

For anything more than that, you would need to write a custom JavaScript or use a professional automation tool like Integromat. (Note that I am a professional Airtable consultant and a Registered Integromat Partner, and the Integromat link contains my personal referral code.)

I rather use my own automation tool in that case (note that I am a professional Airtable consultant and developer, and the tool contains my personal code).

Here’s the official line: “I did get confirmation from the engineering team that it is not possible to update multiple records with this action. It will fail if the “Find Records” action is finding more than one record.”

I suggested improving the article.

Thank you guys for the inputs,


i hope the AT team will improve this because there is no interest to use the update automation feature.