I’m struggling with something in Airtable and hoping someone here can help me out.
I’ve got three connected tables that look like this:
Orders table
Suppliers table (connected to Orders)
Regions table (connected to Suppliers)
What I want to do is create a summary view that shows me which regions handle which suppliers, and what orders come from each one. Think of it like a cross-reference report similar to what you’d build in Google Sheets.
The problem is that Airtable seems to only let me do one-step connections. I can link Orders to Suppliers easily, but getting the region data from Orders requires me to create lookup fields that go through multiple steps. This becomes really complicated when I add more tables.
My main questions:
Has anyone found a clean method for multi-table analysis in Airtable?
Are there any third-party solutions that handle this better?
I’d really appreciate any tips or tools you’ve used for this kind of thing!
Had this exact problem 2 years ago tracking project dependencies across teams.
What worked for me:
Skip the lookups. Create a formula field in your Orders table that combines what you need:
Supplier_Name & " - " & Region_Name
Then use rollup fields to pull this combined data into your summary view.
For cross-reference reports, I used Airtable’s scripting block. Takes 10 minutes to set up a script that pulls connected data and formats it exactly how you want.
Not into scripting? Use Zapier to push your Airtable data to Google Sheets every hour. Do the complex analysis in Sheets where it’s actually designed for this.
Airtable isn’t built for deep relational analysis. Great for simple connections but falls apart when you go 3+ tables deep.
Seen teams move to Notion for this, but the learning curve isn’t worth it unless you’re doing this analysis constantly.
What’s your comfort level with scripts? That’s probably your fastest path to a clean solution.