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.

[typo]

@Air_Table @Katherine_Duh, If we can’t have the ability to link bases, and if we must stuff everything into one base using dozens of tables, could we at least have the ability to put selected tables together into groups? Having some way to group tables, or having some sort of folder structure for tables would be very helpful. Then, by opening a folder, I could immediately pull up all the tables relevant to a particular project or department (instead of selecting them one by one). It would definitely help with some of the visual clutter. If you added permissioning to the folders/groups, it might also solve some of the problems that people are complaining about in this thread. Folders could act as mini-bases within the larger base. Non-relevant or private tables would be filtered out, but one could still use all the linking features. It would basically be a way of bulk-permissioning tables (instead of needing to permission them one by one).

[George_Copelan1]

Zoom works. Google Hangouts too. Whatever works for you. Always interested in seeing how others use AirTable.

Cheers,

[Matthew_Billio1]

I love airtable for what it is… an easy to setup simple collaborative “database”…ish. It makes my life easy for many tasks that I need to setup quickly and collaboratively.

I was an airtable Pro user for over a year on an oil and gas project. In fact I was the administrator of and owner of the entire IT and workflow process for the project. I got approval to use airtable for the project and we were spending about $300 per month on airtable fees. I had been asking for this feature for over a year, and it would have made our life so much easier.

I ended up starting to convert to ragic.com but the project was over before I was able to complete the transformation. Airtable is good for what it is good for… simple to moderately simple projects.

For more encompassing and customizable solutions Check out Ragic.com … Not as pretty and easy to use, but pricing and customization are far superior.

[Mike_11]

We need this feature!

[Doug-CUSOM]

The ability to connect bases together has been a topic / request for several years. We have the same issue - who wants to have multiple copies of a contact list in multiple bases?

Is there a reason why this can not be added as a native capability in Airtable?

[typo]

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that groups and folders could go a long way to alleviate many of these frustrations. If we’re stuffing all of our data into one base, we need a way to group together not only different tables, but different views within tables. For example, in video production, I have a rentals table which holds rental info for all my departments. Each department gets its own view within that table (Lighting, Art, Wardrobe, Etc.). I also have a Purchases table which holds receipts and shipping info. Each department gets its own view within that table too. I have a Look Book table, so each department can store reference photos. Again, each department gets its own view. So now, my Lighting, Art, and Wardrobe departments each have their relevant info stored deep down in specific views across several different tables. If I’m having a meeting with the Art Department, how do I quickly pull up all the views specific to that department across all the tables? If I want to set up viewing permissions for the Head of Wardrobe, how do I quickly pull up all of the views in all of the tables that I want her to have access to? There’s no efficient way to do either of these things. The search field only lets you search for one table at a time. And even then, it doesn’t let you search for views within tables. The ability to group various tables and/or views together using folders or tags would be immensely helpful. Throw in some colorful icons for the groups and voilà, you have created mini-bases within the larger base.

[carlos_cirillo]

Zoho Creator does link different bases (applications). Airtable should as well.

[Kristen_Kim]

I would LOVE to have this feature linking across bases. I’ve already set up a few Zaps on Zapier, but as folks have commented, the zaps are very basic and often break down unless workflows are conducted in a very specific manner that isn’t scalable / enforceable.

[Bridget_Conway-]

@Katherine_Duh @Airtable_Admin – The inability to link bases is a massive downside to your otherwise amazing product. My agency does collaborative work with many external vendors and clients. We would LOVE to have them manage/edit their own pieces of the work, but we cannot give them Editor access to our base because it contains sensitive data they should not be able to see – it would be detrimental to our business if they got access to our base to see under the hood (so to speak).

Likewise, I have a non-profit outside of work. My team there creates events with various different entities, and we would love to give them the ability to edit their own tasks, but they should not have the ability to see the other events we are working on. So, with a major event at a world famous museum, we have had to create a separate base only to manage the work from that event – separate to the primary base that contains the rest of our data.

Deeply frustrating.

Better reporting functionality would make your product vastly more appealing to commercial / paying users. We have been struggling with this piece for weeks now, and still can’t provide clear and suitable reports to the C-suite.

[Ivan_de_Sousa]

I was extremely excited to find Airtable recently, as I could immediately see how this would help me solve tons of issues I have in my company that we could never properly address with any other tool. But I was soon shocked to find that something as essential as linking bases was not possible. Through browsing discussions like this one, I realized this is a 4+ year limitation that is highly requested but nonetheless seems to be going nowhere. Instead of continuing investing my time on Airtable, I am now searching for a competitive product that might have been able to address this requirement in the past 4+ years.