Prevent Duplicates

There is not a way to “prevent” them, but there are various ways to “catch” them once they are created - does that interest you?

The reason you cannot “prevent” them is because there is no real mechanism of “data constraint” in Airtable, other than the “type” of data that can be put in certain fields (only numbers can be entered in a "number field, only dates can be entered in a “date” field, etc).

Catching them would be helpful, yes. Thank you!

Read through this thread, but in particular the post linked to:

Here’s another that I’m pretty sure links to the same demo:

Those are some heavy weight solutions, but a simple solution is to “GROUP” your view by the field (column) you want to be unique - if any two records end up in a group together, you have an indicator that it’s a duplicate.

Lastly, there is hope ahead!! Airtable has a block in beta testing right now called the Dedupe block that should make all of this much easier for the user in the coming months:

Hi Jeremy_Oglesby

Out of curiosity, how do you group views together in a unique field? My key Field is: “SCOTT#”.

Thank you,
Mary

You can use the “Group” option in the menu bar:

You pick which field to group by there. Once records are grouped, if they are unique in the field you selected, there will only be ONE record in the group. If there are more than one in a group, then you know you have duplicate data in the field selected.

If those duplicate entries are coming from a form, we’ve built a feature in our form extension that allows you to prevent them.

If you want to PREVENT duplicate entries from ever get entered into Airtable to begin with, your #1 best bet for this is 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.

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