With Airtable, you can create relationships between individual records. For example, if we were looking for apartments, and made a table of different apartments, we could link each apartment to the city district in which it's located. This would display the name of the district on the same card as the apartment and make it easy to pull up information about the city district at any time. This is what is referred to as “linking tables.”
What does a linked record look like?
Here's an example of what a linked record looks like on mobile. We have one table of apartments, and one table of city districts. Each apartment has a linked record field connecting it to the associated record in the "Districts" table.
When you tap on the record card, it'll expand to show you the linked record field in more detail.
If you tap on the linked record field, it'll automatically bring you to the associated record.
How to make a linked record field
Suppose we're cattle ranchers, and we have a list of cattle we own and a list of pastures. We'd like to link the two tables so we can quickly see which cows are grazing in which fields.
To add a new linking record field, tap on a card and scroll down to the "Customize Fields" button.
From the "Customize Fields" menu, tap on the "Add a new field" dialog, located at the bottom of the screen. This will bring you to the "Add Field" menu.
Name your new field, tap the "Field Type" dialog, and select the "Link to a Record" field type. From here, you can select the table with which your linked record field will be associated. In this case, we select "Cattle," because we want to link the each pasture record to the When you're done picking a table, click "Save" in the upper right-hand corner.
You will then be brought back to the record, and you can see your new field. To link a record to this new field, tap the "+ Link to a record in the Cattle table" dialog. This will bring up a list of all records in the linked field, which you can search through with the search bar toward the top of the screen. Once you've found the desired record, simply tap it. Congrats! Now you've linked two tables.
To remove a linked record from a linked record field, press and hold on the record you wish to remove, then swipe from right to left. This will bring up the option to "Unlink."
Note that by creating a new linked field in the "Pastures" table, we have also automatically created a linked record field titled "Pastures" in the "Cattle" table.
