Saving filtered searches?

[Brenda_Sullivan]

Good morning, I am pretty new to airtable and am trying to find a way to save a subgroup (using filters) of my main table as a separate table - Similar to sheets that run along the bottom of Excel. Is there not a “save as” feature? I am using Airtable to organize the grants that our non-profit gives out. Then I want to be able to select some and save those selections - say for a particular school, or a particular year. What am I missing?

[David_Skinner]

Hi Brenda,

Views are what you need to use. Have a look at the Airtable guide here:

Airtable - Support

Guide to views

This article provides an overview of views within Airtable—what they are, why they're important, and how to make new ones. This article is primarily focused on grid views—to learn more about our ot...

[Patrick_Geary]

My problem with Views is that since it is not possible to save them as a new AirTable, they do not help overcoming the limitation that prevents filtering using more than one operand. For example, if one could filter using “and” and get a view that could be saved as a new table, then one could use “does not contain” or some other function in filters to further refine a search. This does not seem to be possible in AirTable. I would appreciate hearing from someone who has found a work around.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

You can use a formula field to define arbitrarily complex criteria for records you want to filter on, having the formula output a 1 if the record meets the complex filter criteria.

Then simply filter the view for records where your formula field == 1.

[Patrick_Geary]

Thanks, this is what I am now working on now as an alternative. It remains unfortunate that there is apparently no way to save the results as a separate table that could then be exported with all of its data but without the full data base.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

The contents of a single view can be exported out of the Airtable base on its own, independent of the other records in that table – if that is what you mean.

I have a Wishlist table, and a view for only Camping items on that wishlist. This view is filtered, grouped, and sorted by particular criteria:

Using the View menu (...), I can download only the items in this view as a CSV, or print only this view as a PDF:

Using the “Share view” menu I can share only the records in this view, exactly as they are displayed in this view, with external viewers through a discrete URL (protected by a password, if I wish), I can sync only the records in this view to a different Airtable base, and I can embed this view in another website:

Using the API, I can query only the records in this view for use in other web applications, such as Google Sheets, iOS Shortcuts, or a custom web app:

So I’m not quite certain I understand what you are wanting to do that isn’t capable within the scope of one of these options that Airtable provides.

[Patrick_Geary]

Many thanks for this detailed information. I will have to work my way through it and see if I can accomplish all of my objectives. This is very helpful.

Patrick J. Geary
Emeritus Professor of History
Institute for Advanced Study

3570 S River Parkway
N. 2107
Portland OR 97239
United States

Sent from my iPhone

[Patrick_Geary]

My table contains images which cannot be downloaded in a CSV file. Only the URL is downloaded. I suppose that it would be possible to write a script to recover them, but I will need to learn how to do this. I am very much a beginner in AirTable.

Patrick J. Geary
Emeritus Professor of History
Institute for Advanced Study

3570 S River Parkway
N. 2107
Portland OR 97239
United States

Sent from my iPhone

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

What is your end goal? What is your desired final destination for the data you are entering and storing in Airtable?

[Patrick_Geary]

Our intermediate goal is to create a working database that contains archaeological and genomic data including images, geolocations, and interactive maps of over 10,000 burials from the fifth to ninth centuries. It must be readily manipulatable for a wide variety of analyses by a large, international team. The end goal is that the data must be made publically accessible after some unpublished parts of the data are removed from the public site.