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.

[Aicx_Medina]

Is there an update to linking bases? This request was created back in 2015

[Megan_Boshuyzen]

+1 this. A few of us are evaluating airbase for our non-profit and the first thing I was asked was if we can link between bases.

Here’s my use-case: I have a base for all email marketing. In something like a project manager, an email task could live in two categories: one of all my emails, and one the specific project. Right now, I either have to choose whether to put an email in email base (therefore seeing a larger view of all emails I need to create for different initiatives) or my smaller project (therefore not seeing it with my master list). Sure, I could copy/paste records, but that creates extra work and more room for error. I’d rather just link it, and then my coworkers can see a master view of everything in their project (which would include things like, emails, website updates, firect mail, etc). If I had everything in one base, the sheer amount of data would be too much - even with the powerful filtering features (which I use a lot).

Please add this - Airtable is basically being compared to basic features in excel, and if we can’t meet those then we may not be able to continue with Airtable.

[Anna_Miller]

Since this is not a feature that AirTable offers, has anybody found a different tool that integrates with AirTable or used the API to build this functionality? I’m primarily looking for reporting across mutliple bases.

[Katy_Voorhorst]

I’d like to chime in with a vote for this as well! We are just getting set up with AirTable (and loving it so far!), and even with our limited experience, I’ve already come across a use case for which linking between bases would be really, really helpful. Here are the details:

1. We have one base called “Resource Partners,” which contains the names of companies we work with, names & contact information for the people we work with there, and even a rating of the company & a “grade” for how frequently we work with them.

2. Another base is “New Business Development,” and it is essentially our sales pipeline. In this base, we want to include the names of the businesses in “Resource Partners” that we’ve sent requests for quotes to, whether they’ve replied, and what their quoted fees were. We don’t need all the names of the people who work for each company in this base, though.

I would love to be able to mark a bid as “Accepted” in the “New Business Development” base, and have that trigger an update in the “Resource Partners” base showing that they’ve been hired for an additional project.

[John_Beaudoin]

Just wondering – would base-linking serve as a work-around for that other frequently requested feature – more granular permissions? I think either approach would address my use case: I have a “master base” that contains pricing, client and project information, and I want collaborators to be able to view and update some, but not all, of the fields and/or records. It’s obvious that granular permissions could accomplish this, but I think linking records across bases would solve most of the issues (i.e. on base would hold the pricing data, and it would link to the client and project bases).

[Bryan_Douglas-H]

I’m evaluating Airbase as a viable product for my business and my clients’ businesses - but this is a show-stopper for me. One of the basic fundamentals of databases.

Is there a link to a reason why Airtable doesn’t have this?

[Zac]

@Airtable_Team , Can we have an update / date for this feature?
I’m sure it’s not an easy one to add, but it’s the single biggest issue we all have with your product. I would love to know what’s the plan.

[entropic]

I would love an update too @Andrew. And this excellent suggestion from @John_Beaudoin:

would base-linking serve as a work-around for that other frequently requested feature – more granular permissions?

sounds like it could probably solve a majority of the requests for permissions granularity. Speaking for myself, I think I could revise my bases to use this as a permissions workaround…

[Bryan_Douglas-H]

If we look at Google Sheets, each sheet has its own permission - and you can link to any sheet imaginable - so long as there’s read access.

This could open up the a WORLD of collaboration between Airtable users…

e.g. if somebody shares a base with country codes, regions etc. or population stats that only need to be updated in a central place.

My use case for sharing, would be that I create a base for all my customers to reference, so they don’t need to do the work themselves - read only of course.

[Lauren_Perfors]

YES that would be awesome! I will see that it helps that I discovered that I can use “dumb” links – copying the link to a record and pasting it into a URL record field in another base will take me back to that record when clicked. BUT I don’t want to have to go to the base I want to link to, find and open the record, copy the link, return to the new base, find the record I was working on and paste. Yikes, that’s not really scalable in a workflow.

I would use this to create an effective master task list for myself. I store each individual client’s project in it’s own base, then I have a base for my company. I want my company base to hold my master task list across all bases, where I can link to tasks in each individual base. It’s the only way I’ve thought of to have a master task list that gives me a big picture of everything I need to do in a given day. Otherwise, I have to visit 6+ bases and manually make a new list of tasks just to see what’s assigned to me that needs to get done in a given day.