Looking to group text message archives into conversations

[Moez_Tharani]

I have an archive of text messages that contains a date field, direction, to_phone, from_phone and message content. Here’s how it looks in Airtable base:

What I’d like to do is have Airtable display this in such a way where I would have it grouped by the phone number of the person on the other end. Now, in this table, for an external direction, the phone number is always the same 15_____55 in the 3rd column and for an internal direction, the phone number is always the same 15_____55 in the 4th column. I’d like to be able to click on the phone number of the person on the other end and then see all the back and forth conversations, sorted by the date (and ideally highlighted differently based on internal or external for easy readability). I have 0 experience with Airtable other than just storing data, so I’m not sure where to start. Cheers.

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Moez_Tharani!

You could create a formula field that gives you the “grouping phone number” for each record. Something like this:

SWITCH(
{Direction},
"External", {Phone Number Field 1},
"Internal", {Phone Number Field 2}
)

Replace the field names with your actual field names.

Then, you can group by that formula field.