Problem: I have a membership table with members listed by name. I want to keep people from typing their information into the membership form on our website that feeds into the table twice. There is no way that I can see for me to set a field to not allow duplicate entries. I would like to set the phone number as the unique identifier for each member. I see no way to select or set this field to not allow duplicates. I know I could that in Access by setting it as primary, but I can’t do that in Airtable.
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We built a custom form for Airtable that has this feature. It allows you to prevent duplicate form entries.
Airtable doesn’t offer that feature, but you can do that with Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
Fillout lets you prevent duplicate form submissions based on any fields that you specify.
Fillout also 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.
By the way, if your duplicate records have ALREADY made their way into 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 from your form 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
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