Wide Tables - pros and cons

[Michael_William]

One of my tables is “Accounts” and it has gotten really wide (40+ fields) and growing.

(Name, ID, Address Complete, Address1, Address2, City, State, Zip, Phone, Fax, Comments, Attachments, COD status, Credit Terms, Tax Exempt, Tax Exempt Number…)

I’ve backed up the table and started playing with linking sub-sets of account information in multiple tables (a 2nd table for Address information, a 2nd table for Credit/Billing information, a 2nd table for interests/category information… so each table can be limited to 15 or fewer fields)

What are the pros and cons of wide tables?

The way I see it, going wide is:
Pros:

• Everything can be entered in one record (I don’t need to go to multiple tables and re-type the account name to continue entering information)
• No confusion over whether the additional records have already been made in the additional tables
• Can use custom views to make the data more visually manageable

Cons:

• Googling DB vs Spreadsheet makes me think that DB’s are supposed to be tall and skinny
• Without custom views, the table is getting awkwardly wide

After typing this up, it seems that the benefits of going wide exceed the costs… but I’ve only ever worked with spreadsheets before Airtable, so maybe I’m stuck in a 2D mentality. Are there wide table cons I’m not seeing?

Thanks,
Mike

[Devonna_Wolfe]

“I agree. Frankly — and remember, I’m Mr. Unbest Practices — if it was a base in which i personally had to enter data, I’d do neither. If i was concerned about erroneously entering the state, I’d write a formula that broke out the state abbreviation, checked to see if it could be found in a concatenated list of approved abbreviations, and displayed a '🔥🔥🔥 Danger, Will Robinson!' error message if I’d fat-fingered it. That’s based upon my rather risking an occasional muffed entry of a two-character field than having to choose the entry from either a single-select field or linked record.”

@W_Vann_Hall That sounds like an intriguing formula! How would you do that? I seem to only be able to have an error code in a separate column rather than the one I would type the State Abbreviations into. Thank you!

[atusr]

AirTable allows to spLit the table into “views”.

A wide table is a good starting point to see what are the most recurring values and groups of fields that could be transfered into a related table.

The final solution is to use “interfaces” to enter and edit data.