Best way to set up a travel itinerary table for calendar view?

[ScottWorld]

Hi there,

I’m trying to create a summer travel itinerary, which will be comprised of:

1. Visiting different countries during different date ranges.

   AND

2. Attending conferences in each country, during a shorter date range that falls within that country’s date range.

For example, I would want these things to show up on my calendar:

• Canada travel dates: July 10th thru July 19th
• Attend Conference ABC (which is in Canada): July 15th thru July 18th
• London travel dates: July 20th thru July 27th
• Attend Conference XYZ (which is in London): July 21st thru July 23rd
• Mexico travel dates: July 28th thru August 3rd
• Attend Conference JKL (which is in Mexico): July 30th thru July 31st
• etc.

How can I best structure & organize this data in an easy-to-understand grid view so that all the data appears organized in grid view, but also so all the data appears on one calendar view?

In other words, what would be the best way for me to setup the structure of my table(s) so that:

1. My calendar view will show me BOTH country travel dates AND conference attendance dates on the same calendar view.

   AND

2. My grid view will make logical sense and be the most organized for easy, user-friendly data entry.

Thanks for any help! :slightly_smiling_face:

[John-Paul_Kerno]

I would be very careful about picking the correct date format. In my experience I have set up intricate travel itineraries to find once in the actual locations with different time zones or dates, the dates and times shift in the database automatically. I still don’t understand which date / time format to pick

[ScottWorld]

Thanks for the heads-up. I am not using times in my database, so hopefully that won’t be an issue for me.

[Justin_Barrett]

To have everything in one calendar, you’ll have to put all data into a single table. Calendars in Airtable are currently implemented as views, and views are tied to tables, so that forces the design to some extent.

You say that you want “an easy-to-understand grid view,” but that partly depends on what’s easy to understand for you. Do you want to keep all events—all travel and conference records—in chronological order? Do you want to view things in groups, with travel separated from conferences? Some mix of both?

The beauty of Airtable is that you can kinda do it all using multiple views. Maybe one view has the records grouped (using a {Category} field with “Travel” and “Conference” options, for example), while another has them intertwined while sorting everything chronologically, and perhaps a third groups by country.

[ScottWorld]

Thanks so much, @Justin_Barrett! :slightly_smiling_face: Yes, I think that I will be able to make this work within one table by assigning different categories to each record, and then grouping by category. But now I realize that one of my big feature suggestions for Airtable would be to have calendars pull information from multiple tables! I will request this in the product suggestions topic.