Creating a new table from an existing field

[altnbd]

Hi! I Created a Base of all the content and contributors for 1 publication. On my Digital Stories Table, I have a field for Writers and a field for Photographers. Each of these fields is a multiple lookup field, populated with tons of names. My question is: Can I use this field to create a new table of just Writers and a new table for just Photographers so that I can use the names to then add emails + contact info, and then once that is complete, turn these fields on my Digital Stories Table into lookup fields? 

[Karlstens]

In similar scenarios, I've tried having each category of "Person" in their own table, vs, one master list of people with a Single Select field to categorise each person, and the latter seems preferable in many situations - although yours may differ so you might need to experiment.

A Single Select field could look like this;

[AirOps]

Hello and welcome to the Airtable community!

Before we start tackling this scenario, I'd like to ask some clarifying questions:

1. What is the field type of the writers and photographers? When you say "multiple lookup field", are you referring to lookup fields? If so, which linked field and table are they looking up from?

2. Does this base currently have a contacts table or is this what you are hoping to create?

[altnbd]

Thank you Cherry!

1-The field types are multiple selects. These are not lookup fields. I essentially started this not thinking i would want to have a separate table for these two people -- but now I do.

2-I'm hoping to make a contacts table -- and would love to not have to manually go back to all these entries where a writer or photographer is already assigned to a story, and re-assign them once I create this contacts table + lookup field.  Is there a way to make one and then somehow sync the selections? As you can see there are already writers selected.

Thank you for your help!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Might want to try just converting your current "Writer" multiple select field into a linked field to a "Writers" table I reckon.  That should end up creating one record per multiple select value (assuming none of your writer's names have commas in them)