Help with Formula

[Ashiq_Irphan_Kh]

I am creating a new table, say for example with daily price of gold,
I have three fields,

Date, Price and Change in Price

I want the field “Change is Price” to be the difference in price since yesterday, to be calculated automatically.

In spreadsheet, I could do it as

=b2-b1

Is it possible to do this in Airtable, Please help.

Thanks in Advance.

[W_Vann_Hall]

Unfortunately, if I understand your intention correctly, you’re going to bang up against Airtable’s attempts to prevent circular references. That is, you can’t use {Current Balance} as an input to calculate {Current Balance}. In most cases, this makes perfectly good sense; however, it’s an annoyance with some of my routines where, if I could, I would extract part of a rolled up string in order to define a different part of that string. (Of course, there’s no reasonable way to expect Airtable to realize that, nor is there any way for it to guarantee the extracted and defined areas of that string will never overlap.)

The routines and bases described and referenced in this admittedly not-all-that-easily-read post include suggestions for and cautions regarding calculating running balances. I apologize for its opaqueness: Some of it is caused by the extremes to which one must go to work around Airtable, but part of the confusion undoubtedly stems from deficiencies in my explanation…

[Nicholas_Pretor]

Thank you for the thoughts on the shortcomings of the Spreadsheet vs Airtable metaphor. This has helped me put Airtable in some perspective. I would venture to say the metaphor is worse than a double-edged sword. In my case, it is damaging to my impression of the Airtable user experience. I just signed up for Airtable and have been using it for 30 minutes and I am already banging my head because I cannot edit a formula directly and quickly. Having to click a dropdown menu and then click an option before editing or even seeing the formula seems crazy to me. With a spreadsheet, you just click on a cell and you can see what it is, formula or not. With Airtable it seems “the guts” are hidden behind multiple layers of UI.

As a result, I have now decided to scrap what I have been doing and approach the Airtable concept from 0 without any “spreadsheet” ideas at all. If the first 30 minutes is any indication, if I don’t, the Airtable UI will drive me crazy. That being said, I am sure that in time I will learn to appreciate the power Airtable offers and get comfortable with the UI.

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

Nicholas_Pretorius:

Having to click a dropdown menu and then click an option before editing or even seeing the formula seems crazy to me

You just need to double-click the field header. In a spreadsheet, to need to double-click the cell (or click the cell and look at the formula bar). It’s the same work.

[Nicholas_Pretor]

Thank you for the tip Elias!