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Using One Field to check for duplicates and update another

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My company publishes books and the titles of the books often change throughout the course of the publication process. We currently ingest records via a CSV download from our title management platform that is manually uploaded to Airtable. We already have an automation that deletes or rolls up duplicate titles. 

Currently, when a book title changes, it is viewed by Airtable as a new record. Is there a way to have Airtable check the upload and see that the ISBN is the same and update the record title rather than create a new record? 

Example: 

Title ISBN
ORIGINAL TITLE 123
NEW TITLE 123

 

Instead of creating a new record for “NEW TITLE”, I would like Airtable to see that the ISBN is the same and update “ORIGINAL TITLE” with “NEW TITLE”. 

 

Thanks!

2 replies

mtrebinonixon

Hi there!

You are right that when importing new data via CSV upload, duplicates are created, even if the value of the Primary ID Field already exists.

In this case I see two ways to solve it:

  1. Process new uploads with an automation
    1. Create a new table, with the same columns, to upload new records (this is a good practice to keep the process separate from the main table).
    2. Create an automation that when a new record is created in the Upload table, will find the Record with the same ISBN and then update its information, or create a new record if none are found.
  2. Create the table with an “Emailed data” source. This allows you to send your csv via email to an inbox that Airtable provides and then Airtable processes the CSV's rows to add or update records. When configuring the table, you define a unique column which is used to avoid duplicates and instead update the record (it is the funcionality you are missing, but unfortunatelly it is not available when doing manual CSV uploads). This requires you to have a Busniess Plan.

If you’d like some help setting this up we can do a quick meet, happy to help. Feel free to schedule a meet here: https://calendar.app.google/BDT6pyk35Xk1F9jB8

 

Matt Nixon

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    LanSolo
ScottWorld
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  • ScottWorld
  • Brainy
  • 8770 replies
  • March 27, 2025

​@LanSolo 

My favorite way of merging duplicate records upon import (but still importing new records) is by using Make’s advanced automations & integrations.

If a duplicate record already exists in Airtable, it will merge the new data with the existing record. Otherwise, if no duplicate record exists, it will add the new record into Airtable.

You can do all of this with Make’s CSV modules and Make’s Airtable modules, and I give step-by-step instructions on how to do this on this Airtable podcast episode.

p.s. If you’ve already imported the duplicates into your existing table and you’d like to merge the duplicates, you can use Airtable’s DeDupe extension.

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

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    LanSolo

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