Link to other base

[John_Bacino]

So happy that someone finally filled the void left by Dabble DB.

One of the features I found most useful there, but can’t seem to do in Airtable, is linking to entries in another Base. Often, one will have multiple bases which handle distinct aspects of a business or project, but in which one piece of data overlaps.

Example: A political campaign may want Bases for contacting voters, managing events, and recording donations. Those are distinct domains which need their own Bases, but which could benefit from linking parts of them together. For example, it would be great to link donations to the event they occurred at, or voters to donations, or record who attended each event.

In Airtable at present one has to either cram all of those bases into one, or foregoe the linkage which makes this software so great. It may seem like a small thing, but once you can link bases, the sky is really the limit.

[Anton_von_Siera]

I too see this feature as highly desirable as I often end up duplicating tables and data in different bases as I want yet other tables to be seperate.

To simplify this process would it be possible to set up a global base with only tables that would be shared by all bases.

Or in the intrim, give the ability to copy the structure of a table to another base. This would make the process a little easier.

[Bernardo_Paz]

Oh gawd, wether it’s this or shared views that allow sharees to edit would save me a TON of Zaps and work way better.

[Nathan_Shubert-]

Since this is the number one feature I’d benefit from, I thought I’d add my use case for it.

As a professional musician I have two distinct areas of focus. Each have their own bases which I use to record my activities and use as CRMs.

These two focus areas are so distinc that they definitely have their own types of info, and benefit from being separate bases. But since essentially these activists all go through myself and are both in the music industry, there is some crossover, especially on the CRM side.

Two examples of this:

1. I have records of session musicians I meet, and artists in similar styles, as well as artists I play on the same program with. Occasionally these cross focus areas, and I end up with a record in each CRM for that. Then, I can no longer see all records pertaining to that artist/venue/etc.
2. In each CRM I have a locations table. This lets me see all venues, artists, media, media coverage, etc in a given city. Both CRMs have this though, and it’d be nice to have the same city records in each base. It’d also be nice to see all referencing records in both bases.

Thanks for all the amazing work you do on Airtable! No app has really changed my workflows so dramatically and as quickly. :blue_heart: :blue_heart: :blue_heart:

[Colin_Custer]

Adding my voice to the chorus—this would be hugely helpful as a way to organize HR and employee record data, without having to worry about granular permissions.

Or, if easier, you could add granular view/write/modify permissions on a table-by-table basis, and not worry about linking bases. Either one solves our problems and would be very helpful!!

[Ami_Price]

+1million for this request. Actually, I’d settle for either a) ghost copies of tables in other databases or b) a Zapier trigger for updates to records instead of new. Not being able to link and only having a new record trigger makes things very hard and much more manual than it should be.

Simple permissioning won’t solve the problem either, as we really need to have certain data ghost between databases. For example, personal information needs to be available to HR as well as to Sales, and people shouldn’t have to move back and forth between bases to grab a simple mailing address. And, every time a mailing address gets updated in a personal information base, I shouldn’t have to manually update it in the sales database.

Is there an update to this feature? I have read the thread and it shows that it’s been ongoing for about 18 months now. Thank you!

PS - Love Airtable so far and this is my only huge complaint about what is otherwise an amazing product.

[Helen_Foster-Tu]

Like many others here I have the same problem and until it is sorted out I am reluctant to persevere with rolling our Airtable further. If I were to combine all of my tables it would be so very unwieldy that it would cause a problem as it can be a bit laggy when I have a poor wifi connection. Some of the parts of my business are discrete sharing only marginal data with other parts but in and of themselves they are quite complicated and data rich.

It is such a shame, I really need the feature but I can see that we are all sitting here waiting for it to happen. I’m surprised that it hasn’t been responded to by Airtable directly, or did I miss that in earlier posts on this subject, given the number of people who have felt strongly enough to post here.

I look forward to seeing it sometime in the future. The near future. Maybe?

[Megan_Dunagan]

YES, this would be amazing.

[HammerOz]

I’m not sure linking bases is the right answer to my situation. I collaborate with clients and do this by setting up individual bases in another team because views are read only and clients need to collaborate with me in airtable. This is a poor structure. I should have one table of milestones, tasks, accounts, plans and so on.

I have been thinking about a few options:

1. View sharing with editor type with more advanced privileges such as only seeing records for thier account. Then I could be working with many clients in one base. The only barrier being per user pricing of infrequent users in my pro team $$$.

2. Another option might be the ability to duplicate a base to a different team as an instance / child base that runs off the master base data and yet has it’s own privileges. Like a view except it is the whole base. :thinking:

3. Or make tables independent of bases entirely and have back end tables accessible by multiple bases. Create new base and select existing tables or create tables.

[Rowan_Lupton]

As a person who freelances in both sound and web development, it would be incredibly useful to me if I could keep gigs/info in separate bases, with a third centralized to show gross totals, calendar availability, etc. It’s possible that this is outside the scope of Airtable, but I would like to keep using this software!!
My issue with keeping it all in one base is that it’s crowded and unwieldy, and will just get more and more so with every additional project.

[HansRippel]

I’m a little surprised that this isn’t implemented yet. Is this on the roadmap for the devs?