Sadly and unfortunately, that is the only way to do it in Airtable. Other database languages don’t force you to jump through all the hoops like this, but Airtable forces you to painstakingly & tediously do it this way. It would be great if they fixed this to operate more like other database systems operate — where you can hop from A to D in just one hop. I would send this as a feature request to support@airtable.com, but I doubt that it will ever change.
