Autofill Lookup Fields

[Malakai]

Hi, all. I'm transitioning from Google Sheets and I understand things are different here, so please have patience with me :-). I am basically trying to implement a VLOOKUP functionality.

I have the following use case: I have two tables, customers and orders. Their only commonality is the User ID.

I am now trying to look up a field in the customer table (name) and display it in the orders table by using Lookup. Each customer has a large number of orders.

When linking the two records and creating a lookup field, I can get the name to display on the orders table. But only for that one particular order and only by manually linking a record. 

My expectation was that Airtable recognizes that each "name" field in the orders table should now be filled the relevant value from the customers table. Like I would do with an arrayformular in Google Sheets. But that's not happening. 

What am I doing wrong?

[Ron_Daniel]

Hi Malakai,

I might be misunderstanding your question. Check out these screencaps and tell me if they are doing what you need:

[Malakai]

Hi, Ron. Thanks for the help. Ideally, the end result looks like on your screens. My issue is that I apparently have to link each order to a customer manually (by opening the record, clicking on "add record" or so and selecting said record). I need a way to do this automatically.

[Ron_Daniel]

Entry is super-fast in Airtable... Which part of this should/could be automated?

[Malakai]

If you have multiple hundred orders that need matching to a customer, automation is the only way to go :-). Basically I want Airtable to permanently monitor & match the User IDs in the orders and customers "sheets"/tables to each other and add customer infos to the orders table (customer ID, name, country, whatever). Just like VLOOKUP would dose automatically in a sheet. Also for new orders.

[Ron_Daniel]

If you're pasting in multiple orders, then existing Customers are automatically linked, along with whatever customer info you've used lookup fields to show in the Order table:

[Malakai]

I'm not sure if I understand. Or if that is what I am looking for. 

A quick example: When I add another order (containing a customer ID) to Airtable via a Form, I expect a row to be added to the orders table. And I expect the linked record field in that table to immediately search for the customer ID provided in the customers table and create that linked record by itself.

Same thing if I add the customer ID to an order in my table that, for whatever reason, doesn't have it yet. As soon as it's entered, I expect Airtable to look up the ID in the customer table and create that link.

None of that is happening though. No row in the orders table is linked to a customer unless I do it manually.

[Ron_Daniel]

Linked records will be created if they're pasted in. But lookup fields will not. Here, I pasted in orders with new Customers, and the customer records were created. However, I would not have been able to paste Address and Phone into the Orders table, because they are just lookup fields and can't be written into.

[Malakai]

My mistake, I was throwing linked records and lookup fields into the same bucket. Sorry for the confusion. Is there any way at all that I can automatically fill a lookup field by some process or so with the relevant values like in a spreadsheet? 

[Ron_Daniel]

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to do that.... hopefully someone else will join this thread. 🙂