Display only first record in Airtable view?

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1

I’m working with an Airtable base and need to create a view that shows just the first record from my table.

My current table looks like this:

    Product | Price | Category
1   Orange  | 2.50  | Fruit
2   Banana  | 1.75  | Fruit  
3   Carrot  | 0.80  | Vegetable

I want a view that displays only the top record:

Orange | 2.50 | Fruit

The tricky part is that when I sort the table or add new records, the view should update to show whatever record is now at the top.

For instance, if I sort by price and get:

    Product | Price | Category
1   Carrot  | 0.80  | Vegetable
2   Banana  | 1.75  | Fruit
3   Orange  | 2.50  | Fruit

Then my single record view should show:

Carrot | 0.80 | Vegetable

I tried using record ID filtering but that doesn’t work when the table gets reordered. Also attempted some formula approaches but couldn’t find a way to limit results to just one record.

Is there a way to accomplish this in Airtable? Maybe through views, formulas, or some other feature I’m missing?

2

Airtable doesn’t have a built-in way to limit views to just one record dynamically. Here’s the best workaround I’ve found: Create a checkbox field called “Top Record” and set up an automation that triggers when records are created or updated. The automation unchecks all “Top Record” boxes first, then checks only the first record based on your sorting. Then make a filtered view showing only checked records. It’s not perfect - there might be brief moments where multiple records are checked while the automation runs, but it works well enough for most situations. You could also use the Airtable API with a script to fetch just the first record, though that needs more technical setup.