Archiving records

To archive old records in your Airtable base, you'll need to apply filtering conditions to your views that will hide projects that are no longer relevant. This way, you can focus on what still needs to get done, while also keeping a record of the things you've already completed. By filtering, you get to define what you see, and when you see it!

Learn how by watching this video, or read on for more information.

Before getting started, take a second to think about what records you'd want to archive and why. Do you want to archive records that have reached a certain stage in your pipeline? Do you want to archive records that have due dates over a month ago? Maybe you only want to archive records that have reached a certain stage in your pipeline and have due dates over a month ago?

Whatever your criteria are, you'll need to make custom filtering conditions that will hide the records you want to hide, while keeping just the records you want to see visible.

Let's say that you have a content calendar, and a table containing all your pieces of content. By default, a new view in that table will show all content, regardless of what stage it's in or when it's been published. By adding filtering conditions, you can make a view that'll show only articles that have been "archived"—or, conversely, a view that only contains articles that have not yet been "archived".

To create a view of archived articles, first, create a new view, give it a descriptive name (like "Archived published articles"), then add the relevant conditions—like "Where Due Date is before today" or "Where Completed? is ✔︎" or Where Status is any of Published, Killed". Now, all articles that have been archived will show up in this archive view.

To create a view that only shows non-archived articles, you just need to create a new view with the opposite conditions. So, first, create a new view, give it a descriptive name (like "Articles in production"), then add the relevant conditions—like "Where Publication Date is after today" or "Where Completed? is ❑" or "Where Status is none of Published, Killed". This view will now show only upcoming articles.

If any records change so that they meet the criteria for being archived, they'll automatically appear in the archived records view (and will no longer be visible in any views which exclude archived records). To learn more about deeply customizing your filtering conditions with condition groups we recommend checking out this support article.

This method is applicable to a number of different workflows—not just digital content calendars. Try it with any field containing a completion date or status to ensure that finished projects are always automatically moved to your archive view.