How to design a 'start' base that can link to many - many varying tabs

Els_Hekkenberg · ‎May 03, 2021

Hi all!

We’ve been racking our brain as to best set up our base, but we could definitely use your help!

Here’s the thing: as a copywriting agency, we’re producing content for many different clients. And each client has their own tab with their own product planning. Some have say - thirty blogs per week. Others have incidental assignments. In our main/ starter/ first tab, we’re trying to create an overview of grouped tasks (eg. ‘Blogs week 17’), since mentioning each project would simply be a mess. And we would like to be able to link ‘Blog week 17’ with the corresponding tab of the client, were we can then specify which blogs these are (topics, who writes, etc).

So, we have a ‘secondary’ tab per client. But now we’re looking for a simple way to link our main tab to these specific titles without having a ‘linked field’ for each client in the first tab: this would mean a very - very wide view for each record, while only one link would be relevant. To clarify: our first tab has the overview of all assignments in ‘broad’ terms, so of all clients.

Hope I’m explaining our puzzle correctly: please feel free to ask additional questions if you need clarification.

Hope someone can shed light on our puzzle! Thanks so much for thinking along.

ScottWorld · ‎May 03, 2021

Welcome to the community, @Els_Hekkenberg!

It sounds like the better way to set this up would be to completely restructure your database as a many-to-many relationship.

You would have one tab called “Grouped Tasks”, and have all of your Grouped Tasks listed there.

Then, create a 2nd tab called “Clients”, and have 100% of your clients listed there.

Then, create a 3rd tab called ”Projects”. Projects is the “junction table” that acts as the “intersection” between the Clients table and the Grouped Tasks table.

What this means is that each record in Projects will contain both a linked record field that points to “Grouped Tasks” and a linked record field that points to “Clients”.

This Projects table will be that “messy table” that you were trying to avoid, but it will give you the full ability to filter, sort, or group your records in any way that you’d like.

Even better, within this Projects table, you can create different views (in the left margin) which can each be filtered to show a different client. So, instead of each client having their own “tab”, each client would have their own “view”.

You can learn more about Views here:

And you can learn more about Many-to-Many relationships here:

Please feel free to post screenshots or ask more questions, if you’d like! :slightly_smiling_face:

p,s. If you have a budget for this project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you, always feel free to contact me through my website at ScottWorld.com.