Using a Form to Populate Existing Rows

[Sam_Goldman]

Still pretty new, but cannot for the life of me find the answer…

How do you send out a form for, say, students (in this case, Bob and Jim) to fill out that will populate columns (“Internship”) next to those students’ existing entries in the associated table?

In my little Airtable sandbox, responses to forms only seem to add new rows (4 and 5) in the associated table that end up being duplicates of the already-existing entries.

Because this post wouldn’t let me include a screenshot, here’s a simplified version:

Name Email Internship
1 Bob bob [at] gmail [dot] com
2 Jim jim [at] yahoo [dot] com
3
4 Bob bob [at] gmail [dot] com NBC
5 Jim jim [at] yahoo [dot] com CBS

It’s probably a simple trick, but thanks in advance!

[Bill_French]

Sam_Goldman:

to fill out that will populate columns (“Internship”) next to those students’ existing entries in the associated table?

I think the answer is in having two different tables that are linked together to form a unified view of data coming from two sources.

Perhaps there’s a user far more skilled than I am at data modeling with Airtable record linking who can chime in with an approach. @Justin_Barrett knows the right approach for sure.

[Justin_Barrett]

I made a post in Show and Tell a while back with details on how to do something like this. However, in this case, I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s okay for situations where one person has ownership of the data and will be doing all entry, but not for times when you want to allow outside users to effectively edit their own data.

The option I would recommend involves using some third-party tools: Jotform for form creation, and Integromat/Zapier to update Airtable. I set up something similar for one of my side projects, and it works very well. For your case, you would use the email address entered in the form as the search point in Integromat/Zapier to find the proper record to update.