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.

[dave_brand]

Same here, but what’s the alternative? think I’m waiting for this feature since 2017 - the current permissions are total garbage.

[Caine_Nielsen1]

Yes, please take this feature request into account. I think this is a really good idea.

[Sloth_Outfitter]

• 1 for linking bases

[Adnan_Ahmed]

Haven’t found any yet. I’ve tried Clickup, Monday.com, Coda, Notion, and numerous others, but each have their own major limitations.

Clickup - performance becomes a bottleneck for large tables that Airtable handles easily
Monday.com - no grouping features, and not as easy for relational tables. Also the Gallery views is not as fleshed out as in Airtable
Coda.io - performance is again a huge bottleneck here. They don’t have granular permissions yet, but there are workarounds like cross-base support (but which is extremely taxing on performance). So waiting for any huge update on performance for Coda
Notion - has really good viewable permissions, but I can’t hide fields in record view (called page view over there). So if I have 30+ fields in a record (not unusual), then any user will see all these fields. Performance is pretty good though

I’m still trying out other 3rd party plugins/solutions to segment base views, but there are minor problems that’s preventing me from adopting it fully at an enterprise level. I’ll still keep an eye out for solutions and notify here. Would appreciate if others in this thread facing the same problem do so too.

[Alex_Ivanov]

+1 We also need to link bases! I did not realize how many users are looking for the same thing and have this pain point. When we find the solution I guess we will all jump ship to it.

Our use case is that we have different people that work on different parts of the same project. They should not have access to each others work other than the columns designed specifically for them. Both have separate bases in order to achieve this but some information needs to be shared for two way communication.

Please extend the link feature to records from other bases!

[Yousef_Halabi]

I hope you do not take this the wrong way but 4 years ago you guys said:

it’s certainly something that we are thinking about

if you couldn’t move forward with this feature, as new companies how can we establish confidence with your product, knowing that many of us wouldn’t take this decision easily given that we are migrating from existing environments.

again might be a difficult question but actually wondering how you’d respond to it

[Gordon_Szulc]

Just started using Airtable in the last month and yes +++1 for Linking to other Bases as this would be a game changer for us.

Sure new Beta permissions helps but the ease of linking to another base (particularly if it has a large amount of static data used as reference) would be great.

[Kevin_Cassidy]

It looks like this request is 5 years old. Should we just assume it’s not going to be done? :frowning:

[Justin_Barrett]

Welcome to the community, @Kevin_Cassidy! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: From my experience, you can trust that Airtable devs are aware of the requests posted here and will add them for internal discussion, but you can also pretty much guarantee that they’re not going to reply in any form, at least not with “Yes we’ll definitely add that” or “No, that’s never going in”, and certainly nothing about timelines for something that might even remotely be in the “Yes” category. However, I have seen features added that were discussed in these suggestion threads.

Long story short: they’re listening. For me, I don’t necessarily see the lack of replies as a bad thing. I’m on another software discussion forum run by the devs of said software, and they’re exactly the same way. The one time they broke that rule and announced that version X was coming in month Y with feature list Z, and that didn’t happen as stated, it wasn’t pretty. Ever since, they reverted back to the silent treatment, and I haven’t heard too many complaints. I’m totally cool with the devs keeping their lips zipped. I know they’re listening, and that’s enough for me.

[Furst_Name]

Sorry, I do not feel the same way. There are a couple of items that users have been requesting for 4-5 years that initially received Airtable comment and then fell in a hole. These items do not, on the surface, appear out of bounds for a conventional database program (or even a spreadsheet) and are pretty much standard across a vast number of business cases. In other words, it’s not rocket science.

From a business and personal perspective these limitations constrain me from pushing Airtable past being a standard CRM. Expending resources on the off chance Airtable may come to the party, after 4 years, makes little sense.