How to show limited single select items based on what is chosen in previous column

[Katie_Reed]

I have only just got started with Airtable, and I’m currently on a free account, so I’m not sure if this is doable at all, let alone without upgrading. But I would love to find out if there’s a way to do what I have in mind.

Basically I am creating an income/expense tracker. In one column, I want to choose between Income or Expense. Then, in the next column, I have a list of possible income/expenses listed. If Income is chosen, I’d like only Income items to show up, and the same for Expenses. Is this possible? I can’t seem to get it to work.

Currently I have color coded the Expenses in Red and the Income in Green to make it easy to identify them, but I’d like to simplify it further and keep from having to scroll so much.

I’d love any help. Thanks!

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Katie_Reed !

This is not possible in Airtable — check out this other thread from today, and be sure to email support@airtable.com to request this much-needed & often-requested feature:

Limit record selection based on 2nd linked record Ask the community

Unfortunately, one of the biggest missing features in Airtable is that it doesn’t support dynamic value lists like this. I would strongly recommend sending an email to support@airtable.com about adding this feature into the product, but they are notorious for ignoring customer requests. There is a very elaborate and complex workaround to this problem that you can attempt to implement, but it comes with its own limitations as well: There are some other workarounds to this as well: You coul…

[Jonathan_Lutz]

Hi Katie- Though technically what you’re requesting isn’t possible outside of the workarounds presented in the earlier post from today that was referred to, I do think for your use case you could probably make this work with 2 separate fields, as this is actually quite common in a transaction register.

At the very least you could have 2 separate fields for the categories (one for income & one for expense), or you could take it a bit further & have 2 additional separate fields for the amounts. In this way the user would simply use the field(s) that makes sense for the transaction at hand, so dynamic filtering of selectable options wouldn’t be necessary. You could certainly do all the necessary calculations when it comes to the tracking of income/expenses with this approach, albeit with at least one more field than you’re currently using. With some additional formula fields, reports could disregard the duplicate fields & instead present the data in a single column if needed.

[Katie_Reed]

Thanks for this. That’s basically what I’m doing now with two separate fields. I was hoping to be able to limit it to one, but I see that’s not currently possible. I appreciate your detailed response, however!

[Katie_Reed]

Thank you. That’s basically what I thought through googling, but I wondered if I had missed something. I will definitely email and hope one day this functionality is added. It seems a rather basic feature that is being overlooked. Thanks for the help!