Help

This Product Ideas board is currently undergoing updates, but please continue to submit your ideas.

Look-Up from a Look-Up Field

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
AlliAlosa
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

A very useful feature to have would be the ability to “drill-down” another level when working with Look-Up fields.

We use AirTable to manage our company E-mail accounts and Distribution Lists (Distribution Lists are email addresses that contain members and distribute messages to all who are assigned to it, i.e. info@company.com can go to John, Mary, and Paul). Here is the basic set-up between 3 tables:

Table PEOPLE contains a list of all employees, and links to EMAIL which contains all email addresses (including distribution lists)
Table EMAIL links to DIST LISTS
DIST LISTS contains a lookup field to list the names of people on each distribution list.

I am running into this problem: because a distribution list’s members can contain OTHER distribution lists, I cannot get a comprehensive list of all members wherever this happens (which is often). For example (using arbitrary email addresses)…

say "info@company.com" has 2 members: john.doe@company.com and hr@company.com
"hr@company.com" has 2 members: jane.doe@company.com and jim.doe@company.com.

The lookup field will only give me “John Doe” as a name as it doesn’t drill-down another layer to lookup the names under hr@company.com. I managed to set-up a second level of “Sub-Members” with some linking (a bit too complicated to explain here), but it would be so helpful to have the ability to look-up a second layer.

I know this sounds complicated - I did my best to try and explain in the most simple way I could!

10 Comments
Jeremy_Oglesby
14 - Jupiter
14 - Jupiter

This is related to my request for LOOKUP and ROLLUP to be made available as functions for formula fields.

If they were available as functions in a formula field, it could open up the possibility of exploring deep links via a LOOKUP within a LOOKUP - assuming it’s used to reference a linked record field limited to a single record, LOOKUP(linked-record-field, field-in-linked-record) could be:

LOOKUP(Email, LOOKUP(Person, {Last Name}))

to dive across 2 tables to retrieve the value displayed in the formula field.

AlliAlosa
10 - Mercury
10 - Mercury

I couldn’t agree more - that would allow much more versatility than what I’m describing. If it were available as a formula function it would be EXTREMELY helpful.

Matt_Hardy
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I need this too! Hopefully this will be noticed by the Airtable team and added soon?

Derek_Richardso
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I would like this. My first day on airtable trying to implement getting data like this. Seems odd you can’t do this.

Oliver_Holtz
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

I want to bump this topic, because I need this, too! I have to do ugly workarounds where other tables contain lookup fields that those tables don’t actually need, or to link records manually that I could just look up if this was possible.

Simon_Aronson
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Me too! Definitely something that I need!

Karen_Chan
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Definitely something that I need as well!

Maya_Bialik
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

I also really need this!

Dewi
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I’ve also found that this feature would be incredibly useful. Airtable, please let us know if there are any plans for this feature, otherwise I’ll find some workaround

Dan_airtable
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

can’t you combine the lookups with an array formula or am I missing something? You can also look into a linked record and link the lookup. So you can get all the lookups you need in every table and combine them with a formula field