Overrideable Formulae / Default Value

[Daniel_Huggins]

Hi Airtable.

I’d like the ability to override the contents of formulae-text cells with text of my own. I most commonly use this for record titling/naming. We use Airtable as a meeting/diary manager. So if we put in the people who attend, the formulate title could be “Roger meets David”, but we could override that title to become “Financial Planning Meeting 3”, say.

You can think of it as “overriding” or as “defaulting” but the point is that there are lots of time when i want formula-based default titles which can be changed to something else later.

[Elias_Gomez_Sai]

You can integrate it into the Formula:

• Title field: Optional text
• Final Title field: Formula with something like IF({Title}, {Title}, [Your original formula])

I use this a lot, for instance for Dates.

[Daniel_Huggins]

Thanks, I know. But that adds extra complexity and means you have to have to devote extra column space for it.

[Justin_Barrett]

Unfortunately it’s not possible to get the behavior you’re seeking. Fields can either be dynamic—driven by formulas, lookups, rollups, etc.—or manually edited. They can’t be both. If you’re coming from spreadsheets, it’s easy to look at the default Grid view of a table and think that field entries are like cells, individually tweakable based on your needs in the moment. However, they just don’t operate that way. You set each field as a certain type, and that’s how that field behaves for every record (row) of the table. One-off changes to fields aren’t allowed.

[Daniel_Huggins]

That’s why i’m requesting this feature. Giving the option to make formulas overridable - without extra columns - would be a great quality of life improvement. And i don’t think it would take much in the way of UI to support.

[Justin_Barrett]

Sorry. I somehow missed that this was in the product suggestions category. My bad.

[Education_Team]

+1 For this feature. We have the option of defaults now and those can be edited, so it seems like the simple solution would be conditional defaults. This would be a huge help for me!

[Education_Team]

Additionally, the possibility of adding multiple rules/conditions to one field would be great (akin to the ability to add several layers to sorting, filtering, or grouping).

I.E.:

Rule 1: If {Scout Troop} is not empty, ={Scout Program}
Rule 2: If {Classroom} is not empty, ={School}+“Classroom Program”
Rule 3: If no conditions are met, leave blank

In any of those conditions the field would always be editable in case the default happened to not apply.

[Ashish_Dassani]

Hi Airtable team,

Is there any update or work around for this feature? It’s been almost 2 years and it’s strange to see no update on this request or even a suggested workaround.

Please update.

Thanks,
Ashish

[Justin_Barrett]

Welcome to the community, @Ashish_Dassani! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: While a handful of folks on this forum are Airtable employees, the vast majority of us are fellow users, so there’s not guarantee that the actual Airtable team has read your comment. If you want to ask them directly, it’s best to reach out directly to Airtable support.

As far as workarounds go, the one that @Elias_Gomez_Sainz mentioned above is the most common: build everything you want—including a default/fallback/alternate value—into the formula itself.

[Ashish_Dassani]

Thank you! For sure will try that solution.