Is it possible to sum-by-column in automation, or email a pivot table app view?

[Daniel_Pass]

Hi

I have a table containing member IDs and credits allocated, which I want to periodically summarise and distribute to a staff member. The table will have the member IDs duplicated across multiple days, with different credit values, which I wish to sum, resulting in:
A. Smith 23
B. Jones 12
C. Young 75

I can create this output with a pivot table, but I need to be able to distribute it to a staff member automatically, without their access. I could send regular email/slack outputs but cannot get the summarise to work (perhaps with scripting).

Any suggestons?
Thanks

[ScottWorld]

Unfortunately, Airtable only allows programmatic access to summaries through rollup fields or through your own custom scripting.

An external automation app like Make.com also allows access to summaries through its Aggregation feature, but Make.com is extremely difficult to learn and they offer almost no technical support, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re working with an Airtable consultant like myself who has spent years learning the product.

Although an easier usage of Make would be to simply automate the sending of your data to Google Sheets, and then you can summarize and create pivot tables there… and then further send your data onto email or Slack.

[Daniel_Pass]

Ah ok thank you for the info. Yeah I guess the alternative is to push it to sheets, just would have been nice to have it all in-house!

[ScottWorld]

Yeah, the only way that this can all be done in-house is to use rollup fields. You would need to create another table which would become your “summary table”. In this “summary table”, each record would represent a unique member ID, and you would need to link each member ID to all the records that you want to summarize from your original table. Then, in your summary table, you can create a rollup field to summarize the data for each member ID.

[Daniel_Pass]

That could be useful for a few different things, but just frustrating to not have it be simpler!
Thanks!

[ScottWorld]

I agree! We should have programmatic access to the summary bar values!

However, if you setup the automations correctly, you can automate the linking of the records, which is where the real challenge lies.

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

One of my automation script helpers let’s you sum a field from the results of a “Find records” action. You can then use the outputted sum in your email.