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Aug 11, 2023 07:16 AM
Dear AirTable community,
I have just been recommended and discovered the amazing Airtable tool. But I am struggling structuring my team individual and transversal To Dos.
In my team, each team member has its individual AirTable base "To Do [name]" and each transversal project has its transversal AirTable base "Project [name]". The tasks in individual and transversal tables are structured with similar fields.
Let's say I'm Céline : I have my individual base "To Do Céline", in which I have my individual tasks, which are not related to any transversal project and which therefore do not require to involve any other team member. I also have a Kanban view that enable me to visualize my individual tasks by status.
I also have the transversal base "Project eCommerce" as I am involved in a few tasks within this transversal project.
I would like to find a solution to include these transversal tasks into my Kanban view in my individual base "To Do Celine". Of course, I would need that any task addition or task modification in the transversal base "Project eCommerce" to be automatically reflected in my individual base "To Do Céline" if this task involves me.
I managed to create a view in the transversal base "Project eCommerce" which only includes the tasks that involve me, and to synchonize it into a new table in my personal base "To Do Celine". However, my Kanban view is still only including my individual tasks...
Please find attached three screenshot which might help.
Can you please advise on a solution to do this ? Am I on the right path ? Is there another solution ?
Thank you very much in advance for your help.
Céline
Aug 11, 2023 08:19 AM - edited Aug 11, 2023 08:25 AM
From what I understand you have some tasks that are individual and other tasks from larger group projects, and you would like to see them all in one kanban view. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to accomplish this, as far as I know.
Nearly all Airtable views can only display records from a single table. The "List" view can pull from multiple tables, but requires there to be linked record fields between all the tables. I'll go through a couple of solutions below in broad detail; if you'd like to try these solutions, let me know and I'll provide more detail instructions.
So, if you just want to see the status of the tasks in a Kanban view, you could create a separate table, link all the records, and use lookups to pull the status of each task, but that's a lot of duplication and not exactly an elegant solution. If you want to modify the status as well, then you could add an extra field that duplicates the task status, base the kanban view on that, and then use an automation to update the original task record when the status field change. Again, this is kind of a clunky solution, but it'll accomplish what you're looking for. Note that depending on your plan, you may run into automation limits with this solution.
Another alternative, again based only on visibility and not interaction, is to import the tasks into a calendar using iCal links, so you can see the tasks in your calendar app (e.g. Outlook or Google Calendar).
A more recent solution that I haven't tested yet are actionable Slack messages. You can set up an automation that sends a Slack message whenever you get a new task assigned to you and then you can click a link in the message and update the record. It's not useful if you don't currently use Slack, but hopefully they expand it to other integrations soon: https://community.airtable.com/t5/announcements/introducing-actionable-messages-seamlessly-interact-...