Find Records - Return one records data for title purposes in Automation

Hmm… that’s a tricky one.

There are probably several different ways of doing this, but the easiest way might be to just perform another “find records” action that you know will always result in just one record only, and insert the date from that one record.

However, since your records are going to be completely different from one day to the next, you might not be able to come up with a condition that always isolates just one record from your existing table. So you would probably need to create a separate table that just has one record in it, along with a formula field that always results in the proper date (either yesterday or 3 days ago). Then perform a find on that table for that one record. (You can have more than one record in that table too, as long as you can just isolate the one record in your find.)

I figured this was going to be the solution but was hoping for something cleaner :rofl:
Thanks Scott.

@Manny_Vergara Hahaha, there actually is a cleaner way of doing this (and a cleaner way of handling many Airtable automations). But it requires using Make, an external low-code automation platform. Personally, I’m a big fan of Make because it’s super-powerful, super-easy, and super-inexpensive. (Many of my clients are just using their free plan, so it doesn’t cost them anything at all.)

In your particular case, to search records, combine those records into a list, and then create a Google Doc with that information — and just ONE date at the top of the document — it would be as simple as the 3 steps in the screenshot below:

It’s possible, but I don’t understand your criteria used to choose the single record from list. Here is example how to get a single record id from list with additional condition (in my case it’s ‘not the record from trigger’)

Also see https://community.airtable.com/t5/automations/how-to-get-one-record-from-quot-find-records-quot-step/td-p/62161 for using a scripting step to return just a single value.