Well, in that case just steal the code that pulls data from one table to the other. (Look for the fields having to do with your clients – name, etc. – in the [Trips] table, and the fields having to do with the trips in the [Master] table. Those are the routines you need to do what you originally asked and replicate data from the master table to the individual months.
I know it seems like a lot of trouble to go through up front as compared to simply referring to another cell elsewhere on a spreadsheet, but I promise you it will be less work and less heartache in the long run. When you replicate data the way spreadsheets do — to say nothing of the issue of linking two items together not semantically but by random alpha pointers — you’re increasing the number of places where data can get out of sync between copies. With a RDBMS such as Airtable, on the other hand, there is only a single instance of any given data item [in a well-built base]; anything that needs to know the value of that item does so by referring to the item. As a consequence, if something changes — a phone number, perhaps, or contact info — you change it once, and it’s instantly updated everywhere.
I once bought a newspaper (not from a vending machine, but from the aging hippies who’d managed it since the mid-60s) where the accounting ‘system’ was an incredibly baroque scaffolding of spreadsheets. As it had developed, every time a data integrity problem had occurred, it had been ‘fixed’ by building another set of sheets where the same data had to be entered a second (or third, or fourth) time. The system compared these various inputs as a way of making sure nothing had been missed. It wasn’t double-entry bookkeeping: It was quintuple, maybe even sept- or octuple-entry bookkeeping. We had to keep one of the former owners on the payroll for a year to do nothing but validate one part of the system against another.
One of the first things I did was begin to move accounting to a database-, um, -based system. While I never succeeded in killing off the old application entirely (a few things came up, like being sued for $3.5 million by a self-styled competitor who used to leave me long, rambling messages claiming an employee of mine — in reality, at the time dead for 20 months — had broken into his office or stolen newsracks from the back of his truck), but the sections I did replace were so much easier to maintain.
OK, end of commercial! :winking_face:
