Macro type in airtable

I’m assuming from your description you have a new record added daily, with that day’s product weight logged. Based on that day’s weight, you want to show a running product weight, as such:

If that’s the case, you’re describing a cross-record calculation. It’s difficult to do in Airtable, because the physical relationship among records is considered arbitrary: Nothing is implied by having record 1 above record 2, or vice versa. (Spreadsheets allow meaning to be assigned to the data’s two-dimensional relationship — but it’s an illusory meaning. If you don’t believe me, go sort a spreadsheet containing calculations according to some arbitrarily chosen column. :winking_face: )

As a result, to perform a calculation between two specific rows — such as the one for today and the one for yesterday — requires one to be able to address the individual records. At the moment, core Airtable does not provide a method to do so. Many users chose to perform such calculations externally using a third-party SaaS integration service such as Zapier. However, with a couple of caveats, it is possible to do so in a pure Airtable solution – but it takes some set-up and ongoing maintenance.

Here is a post, with linked demo base, that explains how to perform such calculations and offers a workaround to the other problem you’ll encounter, Airtable’s protection against recursive (run-away) calculations. It may take a little while to wrap your head around the process — at least, it took me a while — but once you have the basic framework in place, everything else is just typing. :winking_face: As part of each day’s activity, your employee will need to copy-and-paste (or drag-and-drop) a calculated value into a data field; this allows the running total to be calculated without invoking the dread recursion block.

If you don’t actually care about the running total, but you want to see daily contributions to a bottom-line total, that’s much easier. Let me know, and I can outline the steps.

Hi Mr. W_Vann_Hall, thank you for your reply,

Your description was right, the base design with running weight. I already looked for some method but you answered already though that was difficult to do in airtable, but yet isn’t impossible right?

Then I looked the post with the demo base, but there were more tables added there, which will make our operator confused to input the data, and maybe add possible mistake when they drag-and-drop
and copy-paste the data. So, here’s the situation and what the requirements are :
We have table in the base, the table splitted to five views whose viewers were different head section of our factory, I just duplicate one master view to make other views. Basicly, each section only look at their needs at their view. And we open or go to the exact record by scanning its barcode, we planned to use smartphone to edit or input the data manually by our operators. The important thing is we only need our operators to update the production data just by input the actual production, not by any ather action. With our assumption that the operator can not do anything else, with precaution that they will misstype or did any other mistake with the data. So they opened the records, edited it with your description of my idea above and then close the app at smartphone.

And actually we really care about the running total, because the manager told us that he only wanted to see the total. So, anytime with his view, he will see the total production instead of any data in the base.

Could you help with this situation? Very much thank you for your help.

One more thing Sir, I think the description your describe in the beginning was right, but we want to do it in a single record, not by cross records-calculation. Because when we want to go to the exact record we scan a single barcode from that record’s link. So we want the calculation in the same record not with other record or maybe added more record. Because if we add more record means we will add more barcodes.
Could that be possible?

I think that Mr Hall is busy, as he hasn’t replied to this for a while, so I’ll see if I can help. I’m not sure exactly what you mean when you say that the calculation should happen in the same record, not across records. Could you perhaps do a quick mockup of what you want to achieve and attach a screenshot?

Hi Mr. Justin_Barret,

I send attachment along with this reply to help you see our problems.
Attachment no.1 and no.2 was our airtable view with a number on the left, which mean each record has its own number and its own barcode.

The excel form is here along with the description.

It will be very thankfull if you could assist us.

Regards,

It looks like you’ve got two different things happening, and I’m not sure how they’re connected.

1. You’ve got a main table where you’re working on items and tracking barcodes for each item.
2. You’ve got a summary table of blanks used.

Do these two tables need to interact in any way? In your comments in the second screenshot, you say that an operator will enter manual data into the {Produced Qty} field, with the other fields automatically updating, which sounds like it’s not pulling anything from your main table. If that’s the case, I don’t understand the inclusion of the main table in this discussion. If there is some connection that needs to be made between the two, could you please explain that further?

Regarding the running total that you want in the {Actual Total} field, that’s the setup that would require the multi-table linking that’s outlined in @W_Vann_Hall’s example base.