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.

[Hashim_Warren]

Airtable Powers That Be,
Before you solves this problem by enabling base-linking, I’d love to see a solution that’s similar ton"views".

Linking bases sounds powerful, but I worry the product would lose it’s simplicity. The more complex Airtable is the less I can get team members to participate.

[Keri_Sprinkle]

Hashim, I wouldn’t worry about that. The way I see it, the ability to link bases would be a very powerful feature, but at the simplest level, linking bases could be similar to linking tables within a base … really more of a lookup function.

Then there are the more complex use cases, like rolling up data from multiple bases to populate a centralized base or the reverse, parsing data from a centralized base to populate other bases. That would be very powerful but much more complicated.

For now, I would be very happy to have the most basic link between bases.

But even if they eventually implement some of the more complex features, that doesn’t mean you have to use them. You could keep your bases as simple as they are today :slightly_smiling_face: while the rest of us drive ourselves crazy linking bases. :confused:

Think of it like an Excel spreadsheet … Most of mine do basic calculations from data all on the same sheet. Sometimes I’ll get a bit more complicated and do calculations from data across sheets in the same workbook. And occasionally, I’ll go completely mad with pivot tables and data from external sources.

But the fact that those complicated options are available doesn’t have any impact on my simple spreadsheets. Those are still simple. And so far, I’ve had the same experience with Airtable. Some of my bases are like that simple Excel workbook with a few sheets that really amount to a collection of lists, while others have lots of tabs, calculations, and links between tabs.

Whatever features they add, you can always choose to keep it simple. :relaxed:

[Hashim_Warren]

@Keri_Sprinkle I politely and wholeheartedly disagree.

Typically the more flexible and feature rich an application is, the more complicated it is to use it, and the harder it is to get everyone in my org to adopt it (or standardize how everyone uses it)

And adoption is more important than powerful features. Because what good is a custom crm powered by Airbase if the star sales guy won’t enter his data?

[Howie]

Hello there! Airtable employee here. I think you’re both right. Many products tend to become bloated and complex as they gain functionality. That being said, this isn’t strictly necessary–and in fact, our philosophy as a design-driven company centers around conceiving the most elegant possible way to implement enhancements to our product without adding (or at least minimizing) incremental complexity overhead. Our head of product Andrew Ofstad did a talk about this earlier this month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKotko1nAbU

[Keri_Sprinkle]

Then we’ll have to agree to disagree, and I stand by my Excel example. I don’t think anyone would say that Excel is complicated to use. Is the first time user overwhelmed by complex features like pivot tables? Absolutely not, because the advanced features don’t make the basic features any more complicated. In fact, I would guess half of all Excel users don’t even know some of those complicated features exist.

I agree with you on one point - adoption is critical. But if the software is designed properly, and so far Airtable is doing a great job of that, then adding more features doesn’t complicate the user experience and won’t impede adoption. Features should be added based on consumer demand to increase adoption. Right now, in my organization, the inability to link bases is currently preventing us from expanding our use of Airtable, so adding that feature would certainly increase adoption here.

[Becca_Cloyd]

Being able to link bases would be unendingly useful. I work for a major publisher as part of the marketing/publicity. We all work on the same books, but our work is completely separate depending on what team we work on (publicity, online, retail, school & library - and within those teams there are more teams) and is way too complex to all work within the same base as it would results in somewhere around 100 different tables or more within one base - just not workable. It would be great to have one “hub” base where we could store book, author, and other major information like budgets which currently we all have to keep separately. If we had a hub, the department assistant could be responsible for updating all of the hub information, which would update automatically across our individual bases. The hub base would also be able to read information across the rest of them like how much money we’ve spent across all of our teams, etc that is relevant for the higher ups but not relevant for people on the individual teams. Essentially, taking a larger vs more granular view for teams vs departments.

[Hashim_Warren]

@Keri_Sprinkle i hope you don’t mind a little respectful back and forth on this…

Excel is a perfect example of what I don’t want. The lack of structure hinders collaboration.

What happens is the spreadsheet maker creates her own design of the spreadsheet and ends up “owning” it for life. No one knows why she used cell highlighting instead of adding a new column, or why subtotals are in their own sheet.

This means no one can add data to the spreadsheet or contribute to its design. And the Owner gets stuck accepting data from team members over email, chat, a conversations.

[Robert_Barrie]

Just thought I’d chime-in, because we’re using Airtable quite heavily now and starting to run into a few limitations that interbase linking would solve.

Our use case goes something like this:

We started using Airtable to manage product pages across multiple websites, tracking which sites each page is live on, where it’s been approved and what sort of content it involves.

The first limitation is that we really want the whole team to be able to see this info and apply filters, without being able to edit data willy-nilly and messing up our beautiful creation. Also: some members, we’d like to be able to edit the “approved” field, without editing any others. Granular sharing permissions would be very useful here.

Right now, we’re sharing private links via Google Sheets so people have access to the views appropriate to themselves and can filter records without affecting everyone else. This is not ideal at all.

Pause for breath. And onwards…

Once we had a powerful database of ‘page content’ set up, we moved onto adding ‘email content’ and linking it to the applicable ‘page content’ record. This works pretty well as is, but again, it’d be lovely to be able to decide who sees content from this table. I’m not sure the sales team really care about it.

Next step was creating a table for all current site issues. We’d assign an issue to a page and keep track of whether the issue was ‘open’ ‘solved’ ‘pending’ etc.

As you can see, we’re moving away from the primary use of the base, and it’d probably be nice to split it into two at this point.

Next step was having a table where Customer Service could log complaints and requests. Then our content team could come along, create an issue and tag the appropriate request. Things are starting to get a bit Inception now, but this means the Customer Service team can easily track the status of their requests. Lovely stuff, but now we’re definitely in multiple base territory.

Lastly, I want to start tagging an issue with the team member who’s working on it, so we don’t start crossing wires. Ideally, we’d have a third base now for company employees.

I hope that, in a rambling kind of way, I’ve highlighted some real-use limitations of Airtable (but also showed just how crazy-useful it is for a company with a ton of data and a big need for collaboration).

My wish list? Interbase linking. Granular permissions. Folders for views.

Love from an Airtable evangelist,

Rob

[Richard_York]

The benefit to our organization is #3 and its because of needing to manage who has access to what tables in a base. For example, I’d love a master NameAddress table … for employees, clients, patrons, vendors, etc. All names and addresses in one and only one place. But, I can’t keep employee-centric data tables (with salaries, etc.) in the same base that addresses clients and patrons. I need collaboration or visibility/use at the table level. (We’d love to control at the record level. Like giving an employee some data management control over some of their own data records). [But I could vote for #1 depending on how it was implemented. :winking_face: ]

[Jonathan_Fuller]

That does work like a champ and can allow for some additional manipulation of the data as it is recorded in the other base.

Still very necessary as a function within Airtable itself though as Zapier can be expensive when you are pushing a lot of data.