multiple questions: see description

Regarding your #1 question about preventing duplicates from being created in Airtable:

If you create your new records using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, then you can prevent duplicate records from being created in Airtable.

Otherwise, if you don’t use Fillout, there is no way to stop duplicate records from being created in Airtable. You would only be able to cleanup the duplicates afterwards through one of these methods:

1. Using Airtable's DeDupe extension to merge duplicate records together.
2. Using Make’s Airtable integrations to find & delete duplicate records. If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.
3. Using a script in an Airtable automation to merge or delete duplicate records. I don’t know JavaScript, so I can’t help you there.
4. Collect new records in a secondary table, and then use an Airtable automation to determine whether the new record should be added into the main table where you don’t want the duplicates to appear.

Although, as I mentioned above, the quickest & easiest way to deal with duplicates is to prevent them from ever happening in the first place, which you can do by creating new records with Fillout’s “prevent duplicate submissions” feature.

Fillout also offers hundreds of other features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, and much more.

I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:

• Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

Hope this helps!

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Hey ​@_Chris_,

Would you mind providing some more context and ideally screenshots for questions 2 to 4?

2. What do you mean move parts from one location to another one? How does your current workflow work (entering the base)?
3. Yes. The structure you use for this will depend on further context provided for question 4.
4. Could you provide examples of these parts and their locations?

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

To help you better, could you show us your setup and give some examples of what you are trying to do?

Taha, Views And Bases

Is there a script I can use to stop duplicates from happening within a table?

Eh, kind of.  You could get an automation to run whenever a new entry’s created, and its action would be to:

1. Look for another entry with the same data
2. Flag it if it exists
   1. Could automatically delete it here too, but without knowing more about your workflow this is a bit scary

Is there a way to move about parts from one ”location” (which is already a table in the base) to another without physically having to continuously go into the data base? 

Could try using a Form for this?  Potentially you could also set up QR codes that you print and paste on to your parts, that way you could scan the QR codes and have the forms open up auto-populated.  Probably more work than it’s worth unless your inventory’s static though

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continue question from above - is there a way to have 1 part but with multiple locations?

Potentially, but that seems confusing.  Is it that you have multiples of that part and they’re each in different places?  I can’t think of a scenario where a single part could be in two places at once

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We have parts that are stored in multiple staes (eg: flat parts and then folded parts but both are the same part) what is the best way to show this other than having multiple part numbers or prefixes for the same part.

That kind of sounds like the best way to handle it, really.  What issues are you facing with doing that?
 

Feels like a quick call might get these cleared up much faster than a bunch of back and forth over text; I do free half hour calls if you're interested, and you can schedule one here!
 

Hi all, 

So some context around questions 2 - 

say i have a part number 1234 on mezznine A but i want ot move x amount of this part to mezanine B - is this possible without having to jump between tables and parts etc? 

hence moving to question 3, having the one part with multiple locations without having to as double ups

context on questions 4 - 

i have parts that are stored in what we call “nests” (laser cut sheets), they get stored here until ready for use where they get shaken out and stored elsewhere again, then a certain amount will come out of this section and then be folded before finally being sent out to a subcontractor to do things such as surfacetreatments before coming back and again being stored until used for assembly.

We are wanting to work out her to be able to tell amount of parts for each of these without having 3-4 of the same part number with suffix as the database will just end up too long. Is there a better way to do this? - with it only currently being 2500 records long, it is already lagging in some spaces.

Hm, yeah I think you’d want to have a table where each record represented a single movement of inventory, and so you’d just submit a single form with this data:

1. Starting location
2. Ending location
3. Item moved
4. Amount moved

And you’d make rollups etc to show how much there was in each location

context on questions 4 - 

i have parts that are stored in what we call “nests” (laser cut sheets), they get stored here until ready for use where they get shaken out and stored elsewhere again, then a certain amount will come out of this section and then be folded before finally being sent out to a subcontractor to do things such as surfacetreatments before coming back and again being stored until used for assembly.

We are wanting to work out her to be able to tell amount of parts for each of these without having 3-4 of the same part number with suffix as the database will just end up too long. Is there a better way to do this? - with it only currently being 2500 records long, it is already lagging in some spaces.

Hm, yeah, I think I’d use that inventory movement table above to handle this to make it clearer.  Unfortunately it’d still have (or even worsen) the record number problem I’m afraid.  Hopefully someone else has a better idea!