Help

This Product Ideas board is currently undergoing updates, but please continue to submit your ideas.

Could you add drag and drop support between rows?

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Markus_Wernig
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

Would it be possible to add drag and drop support between rows for entries in a liked column? I’d love to be able to simple move an entry from one row to another within a linked column.

Right now moving such an entry is not that simple. You have to delete it from the row you want to move it out of, and then re-create it in the new row from scratch. Copy and paste does not work, if the row you are copying to already has entires - these would be deleted when you paste the copied entry.

Thanks.

8 Comments
Howie
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

We’re going to make some improvements in this department that would allow you to accomplish what you’re describing. Stay posted!

Markus_Wernig
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

That’s great news! Thanks.

Chester_McLaugh
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

Any update on this? I’ve tried this so many times because intuitively it just seems like it should work.

As @Markus_Wernig said, it would be great to be able to move (i.e. drag and drop) a linked record from one row to another.

A good illustration of this is: I have a People table and Rooms table. In the Rooms I have a People field that is linked back to the People table so that I can assign multiple people to a room. Everything works smoothly as I create rooms and add people. But when I need to move a linked record from one Room to another, I have to delete and recreate. It would save a lot of time to be able to drag-and-drop. Especially as the People table gets quite large and even the auto-complete becomes semi-useless due to the number of similar names.

Bonus points for making it so that holding down alt or option copies the record as it’s moved!

Lasse_Pedersen
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Any news on this one?

Katherine_Duh
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

For anyone just coming across this thread, just a reminder that you can use copy/cut and paste or the fill handle to move an entry, so long as the target cells you’re pasting over don’t have existing values in the linked record field that you’d like to preserve.

Daniel_Robbins
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

My particular scenario (that justifies this feature request) has to with “Tagging”, e.g. adding metadata to items:

  • I have a table with many rows in it, such as products for sale
  • each row (product for sale) has a column that stores an arbitrary number of metadata/tag items on it
  • the tags are themselves stored in a different table
  • over time, there is “tag pollution”, e.g. multiple tags are being created with slightly different spellings, compositions, or wordings

I want to collapse tags which are meant to be the same tag.
Ideally, I’d be able to do this with drag-and-drop or by telling the system, "change every link to item A to item B"
Any workflow suggestions are appreciated.

Here’s a mockup of the kind of data I’m talking about:
https://airtable.com/shr0Taabg30sSrFhB

Thanks,

Kasra
9 - Sun
9 - Sun

@Daniel_Robbins Here’s a potential workaround for your case:

  1. In the Tags table, change the primary field (“Name”) for records that should be the same to match exactly. E.g. if “coherent” and “cohesive” should be merged into “coherent”, rename “cohesive” to “coherent”.
  2. Go back to the Products table and convert the “Tags” field to single line text.
  3. Go back to the Tags table and delete any duplicate records, e.g. one of the records now called “coherent”.
  4. Last step: Go back to Product and convert the “Tags” field back to link to the Tags table.
Daniel_Robbins
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Thanks for that suggestion. I am willing to do that once but:

  • this is a cleanup I will do more than once
  • your suggestion is also, in its own ways, error prone

Should I repost my request as a separate Feature Request so it gets into triage?