Kuovonne's Guide to Airtable

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Kuovonne's Guide to Airtable

Kuovonne's Guide to Airtable

Specific Solutions

Associating People with Records

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Inspiration

Sometimes you want to associate a record with a particular person or people. For example, you may want to assign a task to someone. Here are three ways to associate people with records:

A {User} field

A linked record field pointing to a [People] table

A {Select} field

Which method to use depends on the complexity of your needs.

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{User} Field

A {User} field is the simplest method of associating a record with a person, and works best for simple situations.

All people who could be picked must already have an Airtable account.

People do NOT need access to the Airtable base or interface.

You can leverage this field in an interface to show the current user only his own records.

You can send automated emails to the user’s email address associated with the Airtable account.

[People] Table

If you want more control, you need a linked [People] table. A [People] table makes sense in these use cases:

You want to filter the list of users to include only some people to make picking people easier. For example, you want to only allow picking a manager in one field, but allow any active team member in a different field. (You can limit record selection to a filtered view or by condition.)

You want to make sure that there is always one manager included. Include a field in the [People] table that indicates who is a manager, and add a rollup field that checks if the selected person is a manager.

You want to include people who do not have Airtable accounts. Leave the {User} field blank for these people.

You want to send emails to addresses that are different form the Airtable account emails. Add an {email} field to the [People] table with the desired email address.

Setup

Create a [People] table with one record per person.

Include fields for identifying information, such as name, title, position, contact info, etc.

Also include a {User} field.

In your main table, add a link to the [People] table.

Setup any conditional filtering for picking linked records.

If you have people in different roles for the same record, you may need multiple linked record fields to the [People] table.

Name the backlink in the [People] table that was created automatically when you added the linked record field. This is especially important if you have multiple linked record fields between the two tables.

In your main table, also add a lookup of the {User} field. Leverage this field in interface pages to show the current user only his own records.

Select Field

It is also possible to use a single select or multiple select field where each choice is the name of a person.

Although this is rarely the best choice, it can be a simple solution for situations that meet ALL of the following conditions:

Some of the people do not have Airtable accounts.

There are very few people to choose from.

You rarely need to add or remove people.

You do not need to filter the list of people to allow picking from a sub-set.

You do not need any additional information about the people, such as email addresses.

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Publish date: 2024-11-11

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