I need the primary field to be single-select. Is this just not possible (no workaround)?

[SLT_UXd]

It took me a while to discover that the reason why “single select” was not available in the column menu, was because that column was the “primary field”. I’m not sure why this quirk exists, but is there a workaround?

[JonathanBowen]

Hi @SLT_UXd - do you need it to be a single select or do you just need it to show the values you might get from a single select? If the latter, then just have a single select in another field and make the primary field a formula that is equal to the value of the single select:

The reason, I think, that the primary field can’t be a single select is you could end up with many, many rows that have the same key value. Whilst Airtable doesn’t enforce that the primary field is unique, I try, wherever I can, to make it unique. The danger is that this primary field is a link in another table and when you try to make the link you’re presented with multiple records each with the same value - which one do you choose?

JB

[SLT_UXd]

Thanks for the quick response @JonathanBowen. Well it’s more of a presentation thing. I’d like the categories (single select) to be the first column, and the second column would be the “primary column”. So the workaround was to accept that this wouldn’t be possible. Perhaps a compromise would be to allow us to at least move the primary field column around, and not have it stuck on the left.