Hello @William_Wade ,
If I understand your scenario correctly, then no, this is not possible in Airtable.
Here’s what I think you are asking:
- You have one table of inventory items, perhaps we can call this Items. Each row of this table represents a distinct item type in your inventory.
- You want to “take inventory” periodically, which means filling in a quantity for each item.
You could certainly have a “quantity” column on your Items table and update that column whenever you take inventory.
But when you make an Airtable form, the form’s job is always to create and enter 1 new record (row) into a table. In this case, you aren’t looking to enter a new row, you are trying to update a particular column for every row in the table and that isn’t how Airtable forms work.
As a workaround, you COULD represent your data “sideways.” I don’t recommend this. But you would have a table called “Inventory” and each column of the table would represent one of your inventory items. In this design one row of your table represents a “count” of each items taken at a particular time. So all the rows together represent the history of item counts. Then, in your form, since each inventory item is a column, you could have a form field for each one of them.
BUT, whenever you need to add an item to inventory, you’d have to create it as a new column in the table. Further, this design doesn’t allow you to associate any additional metadata with each inventory item (such as the manufacturer, the unit cost of the item, etc).
Ultimately, I think the weak point here is that Airtable’s built-in forms are fairly basic. You might have more luck using a 3rd party forms extension but I don’t know enough about those to suggest one that would solve your scenario.
