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.

[Matthew_Billiod]

Not IMHO, but IMOO (in my objective opinion), the Airtable team is extensively and intimately involved with user opinions. It is not fair to criticize the way Airtable is handling this.

The only way for the features you requested to be available more quickly is 1) for Airtable to raise a lot of money to hire full time programmers to be dedicated to this one feature, 2) for people to volunteer to work on it for free (after being trained on their conventions and how the rest of their code works), or 3) for them to release junk that screws up everything great that they have going for them at this time.

Undoubtedly you would not like option 1 as that would mean the free product would become at least $20/month. Option 2 is highly unlikely. You would also probably not like option 3.

I work with a design team team for high end, multi-user, proprietary software, and have an idea of what these guys are going thru. Personally, I am impressed with the product Airtable, its intuitive design, and the teams philosophical and practical understanding of human behavior, product life cycle, business, and program design.

[Dan_Klos]

As a newcomer to AirTable, I think I’ve been too unrealistic and frankly demanding–as in “I want it now”–for what a reasonable adult (particularly one experienced in tech) should expect. Thanks for your thoughts here.

[Clare_Suereth]

Hi, I would love this feature as well! I am using one base to track customer CMS interactions, and the other for project management. It would be great if I could see at a glance what interactions have happened per project.

+1 for me

Edit: This would also be good for viewing multiple calendars on one main calendar! That would be great.

[Clare_Suereth]

Katherine_Duh:

Using linking across bases in order to create a manager/“master” base, which draws information from a number of sub-bases. Would your needs be met in this case by some sort of reporting functionality that takes information from many bases, or is it particularly important that this information takes the form of another base?

Hi Katherine,

I fall into category #2 for a particular feature I’m looking for. I want to have a calendar view for Next Actions or planned meetings and deadlines, and I have many clients. I need to be able to look at only 1 calendar.

Right now I’m using Google calendars. If it’s possible to sync to that instead, that would be good enough, but it would also work just as well to have a master admin base!

I also would like to be able to see a bird’s eye view of all of the projects I’m working on at once.

Thank you!

[Joshua_Soule]

I agree this would be very useful.

[cheryl_teh]

second to this, i would like to be able to connect with apps like sunrise for management purpose.

[Joe_Cool]

Yes very useful and necessary in my application.

[Mariel_Villere]

This would be very helpful, in our case to link between project management and grant tracking/strategy.

[AG_WMTeam]

Yes please. I would like to have a Base with a table that contains data, that many other Bases and tables coudl pull info from. For me, it would be a master store table, with specifics for many store locations. I would then be able to have many other Bases pull from that master base. It would solve a lot of issues I have with duplicating large bases, and getting timeout/refresh page issues, while Airtable is recreating thousands of rows of data each time I need to create a new table. It would also allow me to have smaller bases, since the largest amount of data would be in the master store base, each of my other bases would only contain 50-100 rows of data. I believe it would put me in the same pay level I am am in, but would have added benefit in ease of operation.
Thank you for making Airtable so great.

[Rupert_Snook]

Katherine_Duh:

Since this is a huge undertaking, we want to make sure that we approach this in the correct way. Any specific ideas on how and why you’d want linked bases to work would be greatly appreciated!

An idea on how linked bases would work: my suggested MVP would be to implement base linking through formulas only. At the moment, it’s currently possible to write Amount * Price in a formula, referencing local tables. To reference tables from other bases, we could write:

• Inventory.Amount * Sales.Price
• Inventory(Amount) * Sales(Price)
• Amount(Inventory) * Price(Sales)

Or something like that!