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.

[William_Nutt]

Crucial feature. Please implement.

[Jason_Dixson]

@Airtable_Support @Katherine_Duh It would be nice to have an update on this. This feature is really holding back what I would like to do in my business. I don’t want every single one of my airtable users to have access to my main base. It would be amazing to have linking between bases to restrict what a user can see of the primary base by linking to a more limited base.

Also, I don’t want one base to be source of every type of data (revenue vs inventory on product vs KPIs). It’s not relevant for my staff to have access to all of it.

[Tom_Ball]

A web based “database” that can’t even link to itself?! This is a joke, surely?!

I don’t know where to begin. I’ve been waiting years to get rid of our collection of excel spreadsheets and link them into our SQL database. I’ve spent months waiting to move to AirTable - and sat down sketch in hand to start… and within 3 minutes (literally!) started trying to link two bases…

My use case:

• I want a CRM of companies & contacts (similar to your CRM - which was my base)
• I want a collection of details about actual customers for management

These share:

• Offices/products - I want/need a single list of
• Companies - I want the companies I speak to to end up in offices. I want their phone number, email, LinkedIn profile etc etc to be the same - not have the same data in two places

I just want to have look-ups that source data from another table. The permissions in my case is implicit - if I’m letting you pick a look-up you can see the items in it. If you click on it - you can only see what your permissions allow (which may be nothing - and it may then be just text)

I do not want a base that contains all of my sales data and another, island of data with all my actual customers in!

Why even offer multiple bases if they can’t work together! The relational database was designed in 1970 - that’s nearly 50 years ago!!!

[David_Proulx]

@Airtable_Support I would move all my team to premium in a nanosecond if I could link two base.

[aritomo_shinoza]

Why is this other post of mine marked down? I did not do anything offensive, and I was not promoting other products. I was pointing out that other products had this feature, but had weaknesses compared to Airtable.

This is constructive input to the Airtable team.

A product team and product manager should know what other products can do. So without mentioning other products by name - other products with some Airtable like features(but not all, and certainly Airtable has great strengths - see I promote Airtable here…) , these other products have some capability of linking between tables and databases.

[Stephen_P_Brown]

+1 For me as assets are used across multiple bases, such as images (social media base, AND articles base). At the moment, we are duplicating uploads to Airtable which shouldn’t really be necessary.

[Kelly_Meredith]

I know I’m preaching to the choir, but this is huge! In our specific use case, we have setup ‘Regional’ bases to track all client projects, activity, contacts, etc…per specific global region. It would be wonderful if this data could roll-up into a larger base that reflected the entire client base. Airtable - would love an update on timing for adding this to the platform. Thanks!

[Andrej_Telle]

we would need this feature too

[BobBannanas]

Everyday Airtable does not have granular permissions is another day they loose out on huge enterprise clients.

Granular user permissions would take Airtable to another level.

Which one of the modular database companies are going to do it first??

Every single day companies are looking for a solution. Airtable is always an initial “ah-ha!” Then it usually turns into “Oh no!” after they figure out the lack of user permissions.

Privacy is a HUGE topic of conversation these days. It is more important than EVER to be able to hide/lock fields based on user/role.

[BobBannanas]

“It’s not relevant for my staff to see all of it”

Well said.