Table-to-Table connections in Quickbase allow you to link two tables together. One advantage inherent in this process is the ability create a lookup field which will link records of the child to the parent. (If you need a refresher regarding table-to-table connection please read our article here.

Great news: Quickbase has just released a new feature called ‘List Text Summary Fields’ which display lists of values from child records.

Why would you want to use such a field? Well, in the past, our only option to show these records within a report was to add a report link, which displayed like this:

Now, with the ‘List Text Summary’ field we can actually display the actual text from the child ‘materials’:

This is a huge improvement. Now you can use this field to:

✓ Display employees in a business unit

✓ Display contacts on a job

✓ Display materials on a project

In this article, we’ll look at how to display materials on a project using the combined text field, but the process is essentially the same in each example.

The steps are as follows:

1. Create a table-to-table relationship between the Project and Materials tables with materials as children to the parent Project.
2. Open your new relationship and add a new ‘Lookup Field’:

3. Set the new summary field to ‘a summary of a specific field.’ Then select ‘Material Name’ from your field list. Note that you can also set matching criteria to filter which items are listed based on a criteria:

4. Save the field and click ‘Done’ to save your changes to the table-to-table relationship
5. Return to your table and add your new field as a column to you home report:

For more ideas to create and leverage relationships click here