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?

[pressGO_design · Accepted solution]

You've copied and pasted in a lot of data, I'm guessing? And all of it is single line text. So you need to go in and link the existing single line text fields - not the individual records! - by editing the existing single line text field. See attached video. Sorry for the cough at the beginning - I'm getting over a cold.

You can create multiple views of your tables that show/hide/filter info based on whatever you want to see. I normally set up bases for my clients that have one main table with all eleventy-zillion lookup/rollup/linked/whatever fields and then create different views to allow them to see what they want. So you might set up a view called Country where you hide all the tables except the customers' names and the country they're in and a view called Product A where you filter for customers who bought product A and hide all the fields except the names and product field and a view called Country and Product where you show all the fields but group them by country and then product.

[Malakai]

Hi @pressGO_design,

I followed your example in the video and heureka: It worked! I'll have to read your previous post in greater detail to understand why that works and the previous method doesn't, but I'm really happy to have solved this issue :-). Thanks a million.

Do you also happen to have any advice on the issue below?

https://community.airtable.com/t5/formulas/sum-ifs-in-airtable/td-p/140553