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.

[Casey_Batson]

Zapier really isn’t a viable option for a work around, it only works for very basic functions since you have to create so many seperate Zaps and they break so easily. There really is no good work around unfortunately. We have been using powershell to access the data via the API. Airtable is such a great product with the exception of this one massive flaw, I don’t understand how this topic has been open for so long with no response from Airtable regarding a realistic timeline for this functionality.

[Chrystel_Olouko]

This is a major flaw of airtable for me. Bases quickly feel cramped with a lot of tables, and I like to have different bases for different projects, but I often need information from one specific table across all my bases, a table that is regularly growing and updated, so copy-paste will not do it. Being able to link across bases would tremendously increase my productivity.

[Jarvis]

Yeah I’ve seen that video earlier and unfortunately it syncs in one direction only. If there were something that syncs both ways that would be ideal. I saw @openside and their product and I’m interested to learn if and how I can sync perfectly, so would love anyone’s experience with that as well… Personally though I think its subscription is too expensive (double the price of an Airtable Pro subscription!)

Still might give it a try if there’s no other solution

[openside]

Hi @Jarvis - thanks for the shoutout. Yes, performing a sync is possible with On2Air: Actions. It currently requires setting up 2 1-way syncs.

Regarding the price, just to clarify our pricing is not per-user, so although it may be more expensive than a single pro user, it does not increase with more users. So for any company with a handle of airtable users, our pricing is much more inline.

[Kate_Wright]

I don’t see the ability to allow another user to edit a record from the shared views… Where is that? I can see the password protection and all, but not edit.

Also, I need some users to be notified that they need to view or take action on a record, but I only want them to see two or three fields, and be able to edit those fields only. I don’t want them to be able to see the hidden fields in expanded records, or even if they can create their own view to not see records that don’t pertain to their role.

[Jarvis]

In Airtable it’s like that - either you set permissions as Editor/Creator, where they can see + edit every table, record and field, or as Commenter where they can still see every table/field but only comment on them, or as Read Only (the one with password protected views) where they can see limited things but not edit them at all. To be honest, this setup sucks, and has been a top feature-request since we started using Airtable for our organization

More about this in this long thread here: Advanced User Permissions

In a way both these feature requests - “link to other bases” and “advanced user permissions” are kind of similar, so solving one naturally solves the other

[DavidMa]

Seems obvious not implementing this is not just Airtable ignoring requests, but that there is some significant hurdle in implementing this based on their existing architecture.

What I don’t understand is why in the mean time they don’t at least offer some workarounds that would work for some users. As one example, from a UI perspective, they could create a sidebar with links it it that would “pretend” to switch between different bases, revealing a completely new set of tabs for each “fake” base. But all the links would actually represent would be a view or filter that showed all the tabs related to that “base”. So along the sidebar might be:

• Project 1
• Project 2
• Etc.

And when you select each of those, you’d then see all the tabs related to them.

I realize this would only work for a subset of users, but for those of us with smaller teams, it could work very well.

[Andrew_Brown3]

Evaluating options for my org and I think Airtable is the solid choice. However, not being able to link record across bases throws a wrench in things.

My use case:
We are a trade association that interacts with our membership throughout the year. Twice a year we host a trade show.
I would like to create a base to manage all of our contacts of various types.
I would like to create a base to manage our event i.e. exhibitors, attendees, project timelines, contracts, floor plans, food and beverage, etc.
I need to pull in contact records for our membership, anyone that will be attending a show, into the trade show base.

As I understand it, I would have to duplicate records out of my contacts base and import them into the trade show base. Duplicating records and potential for error, this is exactly what we are trying to avoid by switching away from Google Sheets.

Please add this functionality!

[Aurelien_Poma]

I’ve been impressed with Airtable functionality and seen it as an amazing replacement of our Google Sheet approach with potential to run our business end-to-end.

Unfortunately without the ability to check data from another base the tool isn’t fit for purpose.
Am I right assuming that there is no equivalent to =VLOOKUP()?

[Nathan_Shubert-]

I just want to restate my high interest in this. After using Airtable as a semi-complex CRM for a couple years, the number of tables I need to have access to in other tables is so high that my bases grow very large and unwieldy. Being able to reference other bases would be tremendous in that it’d allow me to break down my bases into smaller bases, and then reuse them to be referenced by similar bases.