Understanding attributes

What are attributes?

Attributes tell you what type of information each piece of data is in Attio. They’re the equivalent of column titles in a spreadsheet.

There are two categories of attributes in Attio: object attributes and list attributes.

How attributes are represented

In a table view, attributes are represented as column titles:

In kanban views, they are represented by icons (over which you can hover to to see their names) or by labels:

In record pages, they are displayed as the text in the left-hand column of the right sidebar.

Object attributes

Object attributes organize data within Attio objects and appear in every record associated with an object. They can also be included in any list. Only administrators can add and modify object attributes (e.g., rename or delete), while any team member can input data to them.

For example, if a record in the Company object has an attribute for Country, that attribute will appear on every company record.

Exploring object attributes

Let’s take a closer look and see all the object attributes on the Company object.

You can do this in two ways: you can click the ⋮ at the top right of your Object page and click Manage attributes:

Or you can head over to Workspace settings > Objects. From there, select Companies.

You’ll now see a list of all the Company object attributes, which you can review, search and filter for quick access.

Attribute types

An attribute type specifies what kind of data the attribute will hold, and applies to both object attributes and list attributes.

There are dozens of different attribute types in Attio. Attio supports the following attribute types:

Read more about attribute types here.

System attributes

The attributes that come by default with an object in Attio are called system attributes. They are marked with a System label.

Enriched attributes

Attributes that are marked with an Enriched label means that Attio automatically fills in this data for you. Attio does this by pulling information from hundreds of public data sources.

Learn more about enriched attributes here.

Adding new object attributes

In Attio, you can easily create custom attributes for an object. You can do this in three ways:

1. Click Create attribute on the Object settings page to directly add a new custom attribute.

2. In the object page, click the + at the right side of the table, then select Create new attribute to add from there.

3. In object page, use the View settings option, select Add Column > Create new attribute.

For example, let’s say we want to add an attribute for Customer segment to the Company object. To do this, we’d click Create attribute and input the following:

The attribute type is Select, which allows you to choose a value from a pre-selected range. Note, we did not choose multi-select because a company can’t be in two categories at once.

Editing object attributes

If we want to edit this attribute, we can click the ⋮ icon at the right and select Edit attribute.

Here you can rename the attribute, edit the options, or change the description. If we want to archive it (no longer use it), we can select Archive attribute.

List attributes

List attributes organize data that belong to a specific list (a customizable grouping of records, see here). They are used to track data related to a specific business process.

For example, in this sales pipeline, we have both object attributes (Description, City, Estimated ARR) and list attributes (Estimated contract value, Owner, Stage), the latter of which are only in this list.

However, even though the data is contained to this list, it’s still connected to the underlying record. Any data from a list attribute will be associated with an object record, appearing in the list section of a record page.

On this record page, you can see that the value of $7,570 for Estimated contract value is visible in the record page in the lists section of the right sidebar. Any attribute changes or activity in a list related to the record are also listed in the activity feed.

This is great for your teammates as they can get the full picture of what’s going on with a customer.

Exploring list attributes

If we want to see all the attributes pertaining to a list, there are several options:

1. Click ⋮ at the top right of your list and select Manage attributes.

2. Go to Workspace settings > Lists and choose your list name and then click Attributes.

There are system attributes that come with every list: Parent Record, Added to list at, and Added to list by. These are important because they link the list to parent records and also track who added what to a list, and at what time.

Adding new list attributes

To create a new list attribute, you can do so in several ways:

In the attributes section of the list settings page, you can click Create new attribute.

In a table view, there are two ways to add new list attributes:

1. Click the + at the right side of your columns, and then Create new attribute .

2. Click View settings > Add Column > Create new attribute.

In a kanban view, you can click View settings > Add card row > Create new attribute.

Editing list attributes

To edit a list attribute, we can head to the attributes section of the list settings page, and click the ⋮ > Edit attribute.

Here you can rename the attribute, edit the options, or change the description. If we want to archive it (no longer use it), we can select Archive attribute. Users with 'Read and Write' access or higher can add, edit, or archive list attributes.

Learn more

For a full explanation of attributes and how to create and manage them, see the Attributes article in our Reference section.

Up next

Learn about records.