Linked Records vs "VLOOKUP" (type of action)

[Melanie_Frome]

Is it possible to have a LINKED RECORD pull into table 1 from table 2 the same way Excel uses VLOOKUP?

For example:
TABLE1 - COLUMN 1 = DATES - I want to see if the date has an ‘event’ attached based on actual date (which is in TABLE 2)
TABLE 2 - COLUMN 1 = DATES/COLUMN 3 = EVENTS

I want to do this without manually dropping the record in each time, as I may change the date for a row at some point and don’t want to keep the ‘event’ info from table 2 if it’s not an event date.

[Kamille_Parks]

The short answer is no. Airtable requires explicit linking between records. Also, the primary field in a table can’t be a Link field type anyway.

If you linked every single record in Table 1 and Table 2 to a single record in a Table 3, what you’re asking for would be possible through a series of Lookup fields

[Melanie_Frome]

Thank you for that answer. I suspected as much but since I’ve only been using Airtable for a few months I wasn’t sure if I just needed to learn :slightly_smiling_face:
Not sure if the extended instructions to ‘try it’ would work. Appreciate your help!

[Ahmed_Elagami]

Hi @Melanie_Frome, I hope I got this right, you want to link all events from Table 2 that’s on a date level from table 1 automatically without linking ea h event manually? right?

If that’s the case then the answer is yes you can, for you to understand the linking it’s a two-way link in both tables, so once you create a field in table 1 to read info from table 2 it creates the opposite link field in the other table: in other words, if you create a field ( Events ) in Table 2 and it reads from a date in table 1, it will create an empty link field in Table 1, you can fill by dragging your mouse cursor from another field or using automation.

so go to Table 2: put the 2 fields aside to each other,
Filed 1: is the date for each event
Field 2: it will be automatically created when you create a link field inside table 1, it might be hidden so open hidden fields and just tick to make it visible.
then select all the dates from the event date and drag to the side field to make a copy inside the linked record in that field ( the one you just make visible )

Then for automation, You can always set automation when a trigger is ( The new linked field in table 2) is empty or updated and the action is to take a copy of the date field to that linked field.

I hope that helps, let me know if it works for you.
Ahmed Elagamy