How to get data in one cell in one table, to populate another cell in another table

[Nick_Conneff]

Hi, i’m just getting started here, unfortunately can’t get it to do the one thing i really need it to do, which seems straightforward enough, but alas no…

Quite simply i want the data in one cell in one table to populate another cell in another table. With a spreadsheet id just use an =sheet+cell formula. I’ve looked at (and tried without success) ‘look up’ and ‘link’, but i can’t get it to work.

It has to be info from a specific cell, i don’t want the info from the whole field (not that i can get it do that either). For example, i might want to get the info from Table 1, field 5, line 3 reproduced in Table 2, field 5, line 6.

Contacted support 3 or 4 days ago, no reply, which does not bode well…

Thanks

[Nick_Conneff]

I will try :slightly_smiling_face:

Ok, so lets say there are 3 tables, each have 2 fields (x 1 Questions, x1 Answers)

I would like a 4th table to aggregate the Q & A’s from all 3, into (ideally) just 2 columns In one table).

So table 4 would look something like this (mock up):

For context, i currently have several spreadsheets that I use to gather research for copywriting projects (basically questionnaires). The answers show up in one much neater summarised spreadsheet, which i can then easily refer to. I do this simply by using formulas (fill this cell with info from this cell on this sheet), but i’m not able to do this as simply using Airtable.

Why several spreadsheets/tables? Well you don’t necessarily need all that info for every project, so i have broken them down into sections, that you can pick n mix from.

It’s not easy to explain, but i’m basically looking for a way to make my process accessible to others (or have clients complete the questionnaires), that is more user friendly. The spreadsheets are ok for me to work with, but for others, quite frankly; they look a mess, and would be too confusing.

I am also looking at using a form to do the job on Airtable, but thats seems even harder to do, as each question needs one field, so potentially end up with scores of fields, making if difficult to view/navigate.

[Julian_Kirkness]

Thanks for the explanation - is there any reason that all the questions and answers shouldn’t be in a single table along with, say, a category field. You could then create views which selected particular sets of questions and answers based on the category?

Having said that, the next step of getting clients to complete the answers to the questions (and presumably having multiple sets of answers for each of them) won’t really work with this structure (as you’ve realised, Airtable forms can only enter a single record and so each question would need to be a field in the table).

[Nick_Conneff]

Apart from it being very large, i suppose having all Q&A in one table + categories might be a way around the ‘many tables’ format . I’d need to look into how to: “create views which selected particular sets of questions and answers based on the category”, and then try it.

It’s not something id registered as an option before, so thanks for the suggestion. I’ll look into it.

[W_Vann_Hall]

I’ve built questionnaire/checklist apps for a couple of clients based upon Airtable’s automatic generation of linked records and an extremely ugly IF() statement to generate question text. (The largest contained 470-some entries. To simplify maintenance as much as possible, I use standalone tables within the base to allow Airtable to generate its own formula code.) It’s not an approach I’d recommend to a new user, and my description and example base are still far from publishable, but if you’re interested in seeing if this might work for you, PM or email me to discuss.

[Neera_Majumdar]

Hi W_Vann_Hall,
I am trying to do something similar. My grid has category, question, response. There are 2 categories and each category has 2-7 questions which require a manual entry for an answer. The answer is then linked a response selection from a dropdown. I am having trouble trying to create the grid and form for this. If you can provide insight into how you did your Airtables that would be great!

[W_Vann_Hall]

@Neera_Majumdar

This isn’t quite the response you hoped for — and I apologize for the delay in responding, but, having relocated some 3500 km physically and, alas, seemingly 30-odd years culturally, I’m only now working through my backlog of messages — but you may want to check this recent post. It doesn’t deal with my attempts to standardize and simplify a checklist approach, which are still being refined [in other words, they still don’t work :winking_face: ]; instead, it discusses conditional limiting of linked records. For instance, in linked-record field {1} your user selects linked-record ‘A’, which then limits his or her choices for linked-record field {2} to linked records ‘A1’, ‘A2’, or ‘A3’; had he or she chosen linked-record ‘B’ as the value for {1}, permissible options for {2} would have been ‘B1’, ‘B2’, and ‘B3’. I’m not sure if your work flow would support an approach built around layered linked records, but the post contains links to demo bases illustrating two- and three-level conditional logic.

---

Edit: I should add the bad news is neither this nor the checklist approach will work with the current generation of Airtable forms: Conditionally linked-records won’t work because they require the new record to be created first and then updated incrementally, where a form view creates and updates the new record in one fell swoop; my current implementation of checklists won’t work because it depends upon the ability to create a new linked record, which cannot be done from a form…