@ScottWorld , I went through a few options to look at ways to just highlight the duplicate entries as they get entered into a database. I noted u came up with a simple one but there were no steps written down.
We have a unique patient ID which is in the primary column , we dont want to duplicate a patient file. Every time we enter we wish to have a look and see if there is a duplicate entry and delete if its highlighted. makes sense?
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Your #1 best bet for this is to prevent the duplicates from ever appearing in Airtable in the first place.
To do this, you would need to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable because it communicates directly with Airtable and it lets you prevent duplicate form submissions based on any text fields (or email fields) that you specify.
Fillout offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to prevent duplicate form submissions, update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains or a list of email addresses stored in Airtable, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, 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.
However, if your duplicate records are ALREADY in Airtable, you would need to cleanup the duplicates afterwards through one of these methods:
- Use Airtable's DeDupe extension to manually merge duplicate records together.
- Use Airtable’s automations to automatically find & flag duplicate records.
- Use this Airtable trick that I demonstrate on this Airtable podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc-0Jp6AvAs&list=PLqssva4liHRwHhQIpTXekG8WObEoyC2F1
- Use a script to automatically merge or delete duplicate records.
- Use Make’s Airtable integrations to automatically find & flag (or 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.
- You could even 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.
Hope this helps!
If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
That is not possible with Airtable’s native capabilities. You can search for duplicates after the fact with Airtable’s DeDupe app:
@ScottWorld thank you.
Hope we get s solution in the future. :slightly_smiling_face:
Agreed! We need to see if something is going to be duplicate when it's entered into the database / table immediately! Highlighting or something would be key!
Agree, I also need this feature, where duplicate rows are highlighted on adding to a database. Hope we get this in the future.
would love this feature as well.
See my post above for some ideas on how to handle duplicates.
- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant
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