How to customize the visible fields when previewing linked records

Airtable has very strange behavior in regards to this, because only the first 3 fields in your linked table are the ones that will show up there. Reorder your fields to make the right ones show up there.

For much more control over this, you could to turn to Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which is a free product that allows you to create new Airtable records from a form or update existing Airtable records from a form.

Fillout offers hundreds of advanced Airtable features that don’t exist natively in Airtable, including the ability to display whatever fields you’d like to see in the linked record picker in whatever order you’d like — including attachment fields! And you can display as many fields are you’d like to see! Its a pretty amazing product.

p.s. If your company has a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld 

Hey Scott,

thanks for the quick reply.

I have 12s of views. Which view should I update?

That’s a fantastic question. It only pulls from the very first view in your linked table. You can reorder your views to put the one that you want first.

(What this also means is that no matter how many tables/views of yours link to that “other table”, you will always see the SAME 3 FIELDS from that “other table” across your entire system. Which is kind of strange, because when setting up linked tables, Airtable even gives you the option to limit the record selection to a specific view. But when it comes to displaying those first 3 fields, it’s always the same 3 fields: first 3 fields from the very first view.)

The first view I ever created?
I have no clue…is it there a way to see when a view was created?
Or should I simply guess based on the fields sorting?

Thanks again

Like I said above — you can reorder your views to put the one that you want first. Click on the down arrow to the left of the views.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way anymore. Here are some observations:

1. Creating a new view with different fields in the 3 first spots and moving it at the top will not make any changes to the fields shown in other tables' linked table fields.
2. For some reasons and for certain fields, even you move them to one of the first 3 spots, Airtable won't use them to display information in other tables' linked table fields. This is the case, for me at least, for Lookup fields that contain a lot of information in at least one record.

Gonna have to take that back 😄

Airtable actually does use the first fields, but it also uses the view configured in Limit record selection to a view parameter now. 

Edit: also hiding a field does hide it in the selection view of the other linked table later.

It sounds like Airtable has made some minor improvements in these regards, but it’s still very fragile and very limited.

You may want to explore Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, which lets you specifically select what you display in each linked record picker — you can even display attachment fields!

It also lets you update existing Airtable records from a form.