We’re building a decision-making helper tool on Airtable to reduce the number of meetings at work. For each decision to make that requires the opinion of more than one person, we intend to have people use a dedicated Airtable interface. Someone will create the topic to be discussed on it and then add the relevant participants to the topic.
But I’m having a hard time choosing the type of field for the Participants field on our database. I feel like it could be both a User field or a Linked Record field. In both cases, I managed to get a Participants Count field: in one case with a formula, in the other case with a Count field. I don’t know which field type to pick because I don’t have a clear overview of each choice’s fallout.
Using the linked record field is the right choice, because then you can keep track of additional details for each participant in your People table.
Even better, you can still add a “User” field to the People table, so if you need access to the User field in the Participant table, you can simply use a lookup field in the Participants table to bring in the User field!
I see things differently from Scott. I think it could go either way, depending on what other features you want and how complex you want the system to be.
If all of the people have Airtable accounts and you only need to know the people and the number of people, a User field is sufficient, and keeps things simple.
However, if you want more detailed control, you should go with a linked [People] table. I discuss some reasons why you might want a [People] table in this article in Kuovonne’s Guide to Airtable
If you build it one way, you can always change it later. That’s part of the beauty of using Airtable.
@ScottWorld@Kuovonne Thanks again for your prompt and helpful replies. Now I can make an informed choice.
Since you have helped me multiple times, I thought of doing you a favor in return as a token of appreciation. I could post on LinkedIn one resource of each of you.
If that’s of interest to you, please send me the link of that resource along with your LinkedIn ID so that I can tag you.
