Linking Tables from Form Data

[Lori_Roberts]

I run a music school. I use a Form on our website to provide my staff with a database table of information provided by each potential new student inquiry.

Once our staff contacts an inquiry and marks them as ENROLLED, I’d like to move that student and some of their info to another Table that will allow our staff to view a table of Enrolled students by teacher, date, time, instrument.

I’ve been trying to work our Linking Tables for this, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Just wondering if I’m missing something obvious, or are you unable to Link unique information like the individuals/students name, etc.

Thank you!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Lori_Roberts:

I’d like to move that student and some of their info to another Table

You can’t automated the moving of records from one table to another with just Airtable’s built in functionality. There are third party automation services (such as Zapier) that can do this for you, but I’m not entirely sure you need that.

It sounds to me like what you want could be achieve with a “View” in the original Students table. If you have a field that gets marked (say a check-box field) when a student enrolls, then you could create a new “View” in that Table that filters to show only students who are checked as “Enrolled”. That view can be sorted/grouped independently of other views so that you can see only the enrolled students organized as you need them to be organized.

Let me know if you need help with finding the menu for “Views”

[Lori_Roberts]

Thanks, yes… I do you View for other things as you’ve described. But I want this other table to have other fields/features that the original table does not. Not sure I understand the point of adding more tables and linking tables if you can’t share information from table to table.

But maybe I wasn’t clear. I don’t want to permanently move the record, just share it to more than one table at a time. Is that still impossible?

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Lori_Roberts:

I do you View for other things

Sorry - wasn’t sure of your level of experience with Airtable. Didn’t mean to sound pedantic.

So you can certainly Link records to another table in a one-to-one manner, such that there is one record in the “Enrolled Students” table for every student linked from the “Students” table, and the two are linked. Then you can have some information carried from the “Students” table into the “Enrolled Students” table via Lookup Fields; and you can have additional fields in the “Enrolled Students” table that do not exist in the “Students” table.

This process of linking a student to a new record in the “Enrolled Students” table cannot be automated with just Airtable - that’s what I was trying to say in my post above. However, it is not a terribly time-consuming process. In the “Linked Record” field for a student you need to link, hit enter and type some word that you know will never be in the title of a record in the “Enrolled Students” table - I use the keyword “new”, and make sure it never is used in my record titles - when you start typing this word, all the options for records to link to will disappear, as the search query finds no matches; when there are no matches left, the search menu will highlight the + Add new record option and you can just hit enter again to create a new record in the “Enrolled Students” table for that student.

Does that help?

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

Lori_Roberts:

I want this other table to have other fields/features

Views can show different Fields by hiding them (I do this a lot), the data belongs to the Table where the elements are, you shouldn’t create another Table for the same type of elements just to separate the data.

I don’t know what you mean with ‘features’.

Lori_Roberts:

Not sure I understand the point of adding more tables and linking tables if you can’t share information from table to table

You can relate elements from different type, like Authors with Books or Actors with Movies. You can “share” information by linking Tables (you link Records from different tables in reality) with a Linked Record filed, and then bringing the data with Lookup fields.

The only reason to have 2 Tables for the same type of elements instead of 2 Views is permissions, even you could have Personal Views that are a premium plans feature.

If you don’t have premium plan, or you don’t want the collaborator to be a paid user (editor access) but need s/he to edit the table, the @Jeremy_Oglesby approach is the way to go.

[Moe]

Lori_Roberts:

I’d like to move that student and some of their info to another Table

If you would like to send a record from one table to another, you can use this extension to accomplish that.

miniExtensions

Automatically Move Airtable Records To Another Table - miniExtensions

Move records between tables simply by selecting them. They would get copied to another table and will get immediately deleted from the original table.