Hide Extra Linked Record Details in Airtable Forms

You are building an Airtable form to collect responses from users.

Your base has multiple tables. One table is called Responses. This is the table your form is connected to, and all the fields in this table appear on the form and are filled out by the person submitting it.

You also have another table called Sectors. This table contains a list of sectors, along with additional details such as descriptions, internal notes, owners, or categories.

In the Responses table, you link each response to one or more sectors using a linked record field connected to the Sectors table.

When someone fills out the form and clicks on the sector field, Airtable shows more than just the sector name. It also displays other fields from the Sectors table.

You do not want to show all of this additional sector information to people submitting the form. Ideally, you want the field to behave like a simple multiple select, where users only see the sector name.

You cannot use any third party form tools like Fillout.

So how do you control what users see when selecting a linked record in an Airtable form? Is this possible using Airtable forms alone?

Choose Which Fields Appear in a Linked Record Selector

By default, Airtable tries to be helpful by showing extra context from the linked table.

However, Airtable does give you the ability to control which fields appear in a linked record field.

Here is how to do it.

Open your form and click on the linked record field.

On the right hand side, you will see the field settings panel. Inside this panel, look for the Appearance section.

Here, Airtable allows you to choose which fields from the linked Sectors table are visible when someone is selecting a record.

You can remove all fields except the primary field, which is usually the sector name.

Once you do this, the selector will only show the sector names. The extra fields will no longer appear, even though they still exist in the Sectors table and remain fully usable in your base.

This makes the field feel almost identical to a multiple select field, while still keeping the benefits of linked records behind the scenes.