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.

[Kristen_Kim]

Checking in on this thread again. Do users have workarounds for linking multiple bases in the interim? I’ve gotten feedback that Zapier is insecure from a security standpoint, and curious what other options exist for business users without getting engineers (which defeats the purpose of airtable being “simple” to use)

[Betine_Dreyer]

Any clarity yet on base integration/ linking?
We also considered Zapier, but if it’s insecure, that’s not ideal.

[Martin_Menez]

Link to another base is only a (not very simple) way to deal with granular users’ permissions.

• We, as a team, use Airtable for many different reasons as we all have different roles in our organisation.
• We all have different inputs.
• We all must access and be able to share some datapoints to other team members.

Yet, some critical data must not be shared with everyone in the organisation neither with external users we’d love to invite to the base.

Airtable will truly be amazing when:

1. We can decide which particular table can be edited by selected team members.
2. This feature would also be available with selected views.
3. This would be true for Editing permissions but viewing permissions as well.

Am I the only one feeling the same here?

Thanks in advance @Airtable_Admin! :winking_face:

[egordin]

Completely agree. Viewing permissions will be a game changer. It feels so close with the addition of the editing permissions, yet so far!

[Furst_Name]

I’m having difficulty understand what’s going on with Airtable and in particular popular requests such as linked bases, permissions, copying bases etc. Users have provided use cases, there’s a bunch of “+1” comments, but the Airtable position seems to be “nah, we need more info”. I am now of the opinion that Airtable doesn’t use Airtable to manage Airtable. How could they?

If Airtable (the company) did use Airtable in any meaningful way then all of the company innards are exposed to anyone with access, no? Or am I missing something here? I toyed with the idea of building a national database on a particular species of flower, but this permissions issue would render the database as mush if I unleashed thousands of rabid gardeners at it just because I’m limited to an “all or nothing” schema.

Airtable has amazing potential beyond being a CRM.

[Michael_Fischer]

To clarify the misunderstandings in this thread. Permissions are really important.

There is another good reason for linking bases though. And that is “Apps” with having the ability to link bases you can build different apps for the same company (or cross company projects).

I think the main problem is Airtable pricing. You really should review your pricing strategy.

[Greg_B]

Completely agree! In fact I think that the topic of linking between bases mainly started because of the lack of permissions within a base. Anyway, if we’d have permissions per table, per view, and per user it would solve a lot basic use cases.

But somehow when I think about this, with these features we could kind of put everything in one base, and depending on what permissions we have we would see a total different base than another user with other permissions…So it would end up like having different bases that are able to share data.

Alternatively when you want to give permission to edit values to someone with a limited view of certain fields, there is “Airportal” which is now named “Stacker” the Idea is great but they are developing a totally different user interface and you need to do a bunch of setting that you’ve already done in Airtable. You loose the grid view and some things like the field descriptions can’t be showed in their UI to give you a few example, so not worth for my use cases. I would have loved to see their features as a plug-in seamlessly integrated within Airtable directly, and if you want to activate this plugin you pay extra for it.

Also you can try ”Intergromat” to replicate changes happening in one bases into another base. I gave it a try that worked but haven’t been through a real application afterwards. So I’m not sure how it is really. The problem with these 3rd parties solution is that it is another thing to set and maintain. Each time you want to add a field in Airtable or else, you might have to also do the changes in these other softwares…

[Daniel_Winning]

Adding to the noise here, as if there’s any point at this stage. First of all, Airtable is a great tool and it would be perfect for running my entire business (and probably my life) from if the ability to link between bases existed without cumbersome workarounds.

It’s very unlikely I’ll purchase a subscription, not because this feature doesn’t exist, but because you haven’t even so much as replied to this request in years. Pretty poor communication, especially as many on this thread are paying customers.

[Maria]

Also back checking this post to see any updates! No still no news. Anyone know how Notion can do it? But Airtable can’t? Or is that too simple?

[Adnan_Ahmed]

Been visiting this and the “advanced user permissions” thread ever other day for the last 3 years for features requested by hundreds of users for years. Airtable started by giving non-answers, then eventually tried to hide this topic and forum from the main page (e.g. you can’t sort topics by “most viewed” now, which would bring these two threads to the top; “Product suggestions” is no longer in the Community home page). They’ve given up, it’s time that I give up too.