How to Control the Order of Linked Records in Airtable’s Popup Selector

Let us say you have a table for Waiting Areas. It has 10 floors such as Waiting Area Floor 1, Waiting Area Floor 2, Waiting Area Floor 3, and so on.

Now you are in another table called Zones, and you want to link each zone to one of those waiting areas.

When you link records in Airtable, you click the plus button in the linked record field. This opens a list of available records you can link to.

Instead of showing the floors in a nice logical order, you see something like Waiting Area Floor 1, Waiting Area Floor 4, Waiting Area Floor 10, Waiting Area Floor 3, Waiting Area Floor 7, and so on.

The list is jumbled and has no clear sequence.

This causes confusion because you need to scroll through the entire list to find the correct floor.

If the records were listed in sequential order, it would be much easier to find the correct waiting area. Since they are out of order, it takes more time and effort to locate the one you want.

You want to know if there is a way to have this list appear in a specific order.

Is there a setting in Airtable to make this happen, or something you can do to control how the records are shown?

The order of linked records is determined by the first grid view in the table you are linking to. Airtable uses the order of the primary field in that view to decide how the records appear in the popup.

If you want the records to appear in a specific order, go to the first grid view of the linked table and adjust the order of the primary field.

It also helps to make each record easier to recognize in the popup.

You can do this by adding more detail to the primary field. For example, if you have one field for a product name and another for the size, you can combine them with a formula like:

Product Name & " (" & Size & ")"

With this formula, instead of just seeing “T-shirt” in the popup, you will see “T-shirt (Medium)” or “T-shirt (Large).” This makes it much faster to choose the right record without opening each one to check the details.

In short, ordering the primary field in the first grid view will let you control the order and make the linked record popup easier to use.