Understanding the Primary Field in Airtable

Building a smarter database, starts with understanding the basic and most useful field - the leftmost primary field. If you're not optimizing this field, you may be making extra work for yourself. Check out how to make it unique, identify its purpose, and use smart concatenate formulas. 👇
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Table of Contents: 📖 👇
00:00 - What this video covers
01:44 - Understanding how the Primary Field is positioned in Airtable
04:08 - The importance of using unique identifiers in Primary Field
06:50 - Pulling Record ID Formula
07:27 - Examining the Primary Fields in Multiple solutions
08:00 - How to make Primary Field as Unique as Possible
08:58 - Make sure the Primary Field identifies what information is here
10:16 - Rely on Concatenate Formulas
12:10 - Limitations of Primary Field Identifiers
14:49 - Modify the visual appearance of the Primary Field
15:16 - Final thoughts and how to get more help!
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Software Resources (may contain affiliate links): 💻 👇
Airtable - airtable.com/invite/r/v0eI3ASY
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#GAPConsulting #GarethPronovost #Airtable

[@GarethPronovost]

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[@danieldanso98]

Thanks for this video it has really helped me, but my question is how do I link two primary fields of two different tables?

[@amitavbiswas]

Airtable is Best Earning Site...all over the World.

[@martinjeppesen6520]

Can we have more Knack videos? I saw your previous video on it, and holy cow I've been missing out. The possibilities 🤯

[@godynnel7680]

Great video thx. Do you have a view on using auto number for primary field? I find myself using it a bit, but wondering your thoughts. thanks!

[@antonkal]

I tried to create a primary field that is either field x or field y if field x is empty.. however I couldn’t create it because it causes a circular reference. Note that field x and field y are not necessarily unique.

[@agoogleuser6937]

Pros/Cons of using an automation to UpDate Primary FieLds instead of a FormuLa?

[@GarethPronovost]

I've not seen many use cases for automations that rename the primary field (and therefore a record). Typically we name it something that doesn't change much through the life of the record. The formulas we use generally don't change the value over time. For example, if we use a concatenate formula, it's output is focused on other fields that likely won't change.

[@tracersbc]

Your videos are super helpful!! thank you. Big question. I am working with Japanese for field names which does not work with formulas. Is there a way to mask or something so the field name still appears in Japanese but the field name works in the formula (ie. English) I can't believe that airtable doesnt have a way to handle this. Might be a showstopper for us.

[@francisrealestateltd.]

Best way to get the formulas?

[@user-yf6us4bm6f]

Can you use formulas to create concatenated fields with only the first 3 letters of a field?

[@GarethPronovost]

Absolutely. You'll want to incorporate the LEFT function in your formula and cut it off after characters. 💪

[@user-do9vy2yv9j]

I really enjoy Airtables, but coming from the DB world, this is a backward way of thinking. WITH THAT, that's not on you (on airtable. I hate that they won't let me hide my unique primary keys.😠). I'm impressed with how you educated me on the view I must take to keep utilizing airtables, which I will. Phenomenal breakdown. Ty!

[@GarethPronovost]

Thank you! 🙏