Handling subtasks in Airtable (no third party apps)

Define ‘subtasks.’ :winking_face:

Many bases contain what I guess might be called ‘subtasks’ — although I think they might more accurately be thought of as state-specific routines within a finite state machine. Essentially, they are sequences that occur when a record is in one state to transition it to a different state. Because this is Airtable, they are triggered by the user changing the value of a field within the record; also because this is Airtable, while the routines may inspect the value of other fields (including, indirectly, fields in other records or other tables), they can only change their own values.

Aside from that, there is a way to create new records through copy-and-paste. When combined with lookup/rollup fields, this can be a surprisingly useful function.

Thank you so much for the input. So what we are trying to accomplish is track tasks in a project hierachy.

Project Name
Major Task
Subtasks

So I think what we can live with is focusing on Task tracking linking to the project name in a separate table. And let the user enter their subtasks in a details field as long as we have the main deliverable tied to a person and due date. We are a 2-person startup so this will work for now. We can re-evaluate prior to 2019 or if Airtable adds sub-task functionality as there seems to be some interest in that from other users.

I am evaluating Asana as well. The subtask feature is very important to me. Seems everything seems so easy in Airtable…curious if I’m missing something about subtasks…just getting started but I don’t see it.