Lookup or Formula Field in a Form

[Travis_Groom1]

Hello AirTable Community!

Hoping someone can help me with a solution here.  I have a conditional form that depending on the department you choose, you get different prompts - most of this works great.  Here's the problem:

I have a Lookup field that provides instructions by the department that I would like to appear once someone selects the specific department.  i.e.: Person selects Finance request time - they get a block of text that talks about what finance needs and SLAs.

I have tried doing this via a Lookup Field (apparently, you cannot use those in forms), and then I tried a really long formula, but I cannot use formulas in forms either.

Looking for a native solution, not a 3rd party plug in because we would not be able to clear that with our IT team.

[Sistema_Aotearo]

Depending on how complicated your formula is will make this trickier!

The simplest solution would be to use a bunch of "Single Select" fields as empty text boxes. You can do this by configuring the options to "show field as a list" with no options. Then "Show field only when conditions are met", based on your formula's conditions.

However, if your formula is more complicated with combining and looking up more details, you may have to build a whole system for submitting data using Interfaces etc

[Sho]

Hi @Travis_Groom1,

Have you tried the dynamic filter, which is a paid plan-only feature?
This is set in the field, not in the form settings.

Dynamic filtering in linked records (airtable.com)

[TheTimeSavingCo · Accepted solution]

Hmm, I think the problem we're trying to solve is the fact that the data doesn't really exist yet when you're filling it out in the form, and as a result lookups and formulas can't exist either?

I feel like the only way you could get those details in is if you created one field per department and put the department specific information inside that field's help text within the form.  You could then conditonally display the correct field based on the department they selected

[ScottWorld]

All of the features that you are looking for are possible with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

If you can’t use a 3rd-party app, then I would just use conditional hiding on your form to show or hide additional fields that have large blocks of helper text as instructions.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[Travis_Groom1]

The Single Select could be an option actually - just the single select is going to be REALLY long. Good idea though!

[Travis_Groom1]

Actually, I think this is the right callout. It would exist after they picked the form choice - but wouldn't exist prior to that so AirTable likely doesn't allow it since it doesn't technically exist yet.

I somewhat solved it using "description" in each of the groups under the form - not quite ideal but it works.