I’m working with a product database in Airtable and need to share certain info with our Distributors. They prefer Excel and won’t use Airtable directly. I need to create a report showing each Distributor’s products and their manufacturers.
The tricky part is that Distributors don’t carry all products from each manufacturer. So a simple list of manufacturers per Distributor won’t work.
Here’s my table setup:
Products Table
- ProductName: Text
- Manufacturer: Linked to VendorName
- Distributors: Linked to VendorName
Vendor Contact List
- VendorName: Text
- Products: Linked to ProductName
Any ideas on how to pull this data efficiently? I’m stuck and could use some help!
From personal experience, I ended up using a combination of Airtable’s API and a custom-built Python script to extract and process the necessary data. The script gathers information from the related tables, filters out only the products associated with each distributor, and then formats the result into Excel reports. Although setting up the system took some time, automating the process has saved me a lot of manual work. Any initial challenges were outweighed by the efficiency gained in updating and distributing the reports regularly.
Utilizing Airtable’s built-in automation tools can be an effective alternative to writing custom code. I’ve implemented a solution where a scheduled automation triggers a query across both the Products and Vendor tables. This query filters the data for each distributor and compiles it into a CSV file, which is then attached to an email sent out automatically. This approach keeps the data retrieval and distribution within Airtable’s ecosystem, minimizing external dependencies and offering a reliable, repeatable process for keeping distributors updated.
hey there! have u tried using airtable’s integrations? theres a zapier one that can sync ur data to google sheets. u could set it up to auto-update a sheet for each distributor with their specific products n manufacturers. then just share those sheets. its pretty slick n doesnt need any coding!