Auto-copy/paste text from one cell to another where it will apear as an editable text as well?

[Yvan_Belier]

Hello,
Long story short: How to automaticaly copy/paste a text from a cell to another where it will apear as an editable text as well?

I’m developing a CRM.
I Use a first table “PRODUCTS” as a product list.
A second one “OFFERS” as an offers editing list.
and a third one “PRODUCTS LINE” to edit products lines in each offers (quantities, discounts, comments etc)
On my “Product line” sheet, I would like when I call a product from the “product” sheet, that its standard descrition (a text, in the product sheet) appears as a text as well im my “product line” sheet where I’ll be able to edit it for this offer only.

thanks in advance

[Justin_Barrett · Accepted solution]

If your base is in a Pro-plan account or higher, this can be done using Airtable’s built-in automation features.

To set this up, add two new fields to your [Product Line] table:

• A single line text field named something like {Custom Name}. This is where the product’s name will be copied by the automation for manual editing.
• A formula field named something like {Name from Link} that simply echoes the name of your linked product. This is required because automation steps can’t pull directly from link fields. Here’s a look at that formula field setup

Make a new view named something like “Trigger: Product Link”, and add a filter so that it only shows records where the {Products} field is not empty.

Make a new automation, with the trigger being a new record in that “Trigger: Product Link” view.

Add an “Update record” action, which will update the {Custom Name} field with the value from the {Name from Link} formula.

Turn on the automation, and now you’ll get an editable version of the product name whenever you link to a product.

[ScottWorld]

Hi @Justin_Barrett,

This is slightly off-topic, but I just discovered something very strange about Airtable’s automations.

This automation works perfectly fine for choosing a linked record, so it solves @Yvan_Belier’s problem above.

But in general, it seems like Airtable automations don’t actually work well for just typing text in a field.

For example, if we were to change Yvan’s linked record field to a normal text field, Airtable would trigger as soon as he typed in the very first letter into the text field, and then only the very first letter would show up in “Custom Name”.

Furthermore, the “New Records in View” command doesn’t re-trigger if we make a change to the triggering field (and this would affect @Yvan_Belier as well). The record actually needs to FALL OFF the view and then REAPPEAR on the view for the trigger to happen again.

I really feel like these are some serious limitations of Airtable’s automations, which leads me back to referring people to Integromat again & again.

What are your thoughts on this issue?

[Justin_Barrett]

ScottWorld:

Furthermore, the “New Records in View” command doesn’t re-trigger if we make a change to the triggering field (and this would affect @Yvan_Belier as well). The record actually needs to FALL OFF the view and then REAPPEAR on the view for the trigger to happen again.

Correct. In this case, @Yvan_Belier would need to delete the current product link, then add a new one. However, if the link field is set up to only allow linking to a single record, this would be the behavior by default, so the record would naturally fall out of that trigger view, then back into it once the new link is added.

To your bigger question, though, it is possible to do something with a text field (or any manually-editable field) that would pick up all of that field’s changes, not just the first few characters. In fact, one of my earliest tests of Airtable’s automation system was along this line. It’s a little more complex to set up, but it works quite well. Rather than take up space here, though, I’ll start a new thread.

[Justin_Barrett]

@Yvan_Belier @ScottWorld Here’s the new thread if you’re interested:

How to pick up ALL changes to a manual entry field via automation Show and tell

UPDATE 09/05/2020 - The new “updated record” trigger for automations makes this workaround unnecessary (more notes in a comment farther down in this thread), but I’ll leave the thread here anyway. Using Airtable’s new (but still technically in beta for Pro-plan users and up at the time I’m writing this) automation features, how can an automation pick up all changes to a field? It wouldn’t be a new record trigger, and the only other option right now is a new record in a view. If the field in qu…

[Yvan_Belier]

Hi Justin,

this is perfect!

My issue was that I didn’t figured the “formula step” to echoes the name of the linked products.

Thanks!!