Total number of times a record has been modified

You can create an automation with the trigger 'When a record is updated', and in the action section, you can increase the value of the field by one.

Taha, Airtable Advisor

​@tahajiru It’s not quite as easy as that, because automations don’t support any sort of math or calculations.

To solve this problem, there has to be a formula field created in the table which is equal to 1 + the field that is keeping track of the current modification count.

Then, when the automation runs, you would insert the value of that formula into the field that is keeping track of the current modification count.

Also, the automation trigger for  “when a record is updated” might update many many many times for text fields because it triggers with nearly every keystroke. So ideally, avoid text fields for the trigger.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

In order to avoid issue described by ​@ScottWorld I would probably suggest have a “Submit Update” field of Checkbox field type. In such way, the automation should get triggered when Submit Update is not empty (record matches conditions). It should also update the record using the workflow described by Scott (helper field to do the math +1), and it should then clear the “Submit Update” field to make it blank again! 

Hope this helps! Feel free to schedule a call using this link and we can probably get it solved on the go.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Thanks, everyone. James from Airtable Support actually solved this for me! Here’s what he said: 

“In order to accomplish this you'll want to configure a change log to track the number of changes made to your records. For your convenience, here is a short video I put together walking through how to configure this. 

Also, here is the formula I used for the primary field of the change log:

{Projects for Change Log} & " - " &DATETIME_FORMAT({Update Date}, 'MM/DD/YYYY')