This would go a long way in letting many of us move completely away from Trello, Asana, Etc. into Airtable. I know there are workarounds (link to another table’s list containing the tasks), but that quickly becomes overly cumbersome. Would love to have simple checklist as a field option!
YES! I am so happy to see that I am not the only person who has requested this. 95% of my tasks have some sort of 2+ step process. In order to make sure I do each step, a checklist is vital. Right now, since switching to AirTable I’ve moved all of my checklists to Evernote, then link to them from the AirTable record. It’s cumbersome and not ideal. When I used both Asana, Trello, and other proj mgmt systems they all had this feature… it was key for me. Lack of this feature was almost a deal-breaker for me when I switched to AirTable because checklists in tasks were integrated into the majority of what my team and I do every day. It also helps with QC to have the checklist within AirTable - if my team member assigned to a record checks all of the boxes, they are then held accountable for completing each step. Without that checklist where they have to check the box, they more frequently forget steps.
I’ve written a couple of blog posts which may help you with this subject - one with Airtable creating subtasks automatically and the other linking to Process Street which is a great app for standardising processes with repeatable tasks (and integrates well with Airtable):
I’ve already commented on this once but I thought I would add some comments further…
Personally, I would vote against adding a special task list field type to Airtable (or any other relational database for that matter) as it is too inflexible and generally bad practice. For me, the correct way to implement this in a database is to use a tasks table as @Hashim_Warren says above. The problem is that Airtable’s UI implementation makes this cumbersome (it’s a bit better in Expanded view).
A better solution, and one that would be far more general purpose would be for Airtable to implement a better solution in their UI for using child tables - and importantly, to also enforce referential integrity properly - for example, to make sure that one to many relationships are enforced no matter how a record is entered and provide for Cascade Delete to remove child records when the ‘parent’ is deleted.
This isn’t top of my priority list but it’s up there - having said that Airtable is a great product to use!
also @Hashim_Warren provide an example of how’d you’d structure the main and “task” tables. I have one done but it can’t be optimal. My main table has a one-to-many relationship to the task table. The main table checklist column displays no tasks if all are complete and vice-versa displays all tasks if none are complete. Please tell me this isn’t the best way to do this currently.
Sorry I don’t feel comfortable doing that. Thank you for reaching out Julian. I appreciate it very much. I’m going to try to use a third table for now and see how that goes.
If you do get stuck then create a copy of your base and randomise the data with some copy and pasting (or delete it and enter a few records) and I’ll take a look.
