You’re talking about the fields that you’re manually choosing to match for deduping, right?

Since you know in advance which fields that you will be choosing for your match, what I would recommend is just create a new view that filters out any records that are blank in those fields.

Then, you can run the dedupe on only the records that are displaying in that view.

thanks for the response, sorry im not being clear.

So if I have a contact database and I’m checking to “dedupe” records which have the same email address, it’s not helpful to have it suggest 38 contacts without email addresses are the same person. Seems like a lot of work to filter out blank fields. When would anyone ever under any circumstances consider two records each with a matching blank field to be the same record?