Remove duplicates in look up field

There’s also the Dedupe app, but both require an extra step, as does the automation checkbox workaround that @Adam_Minich shared above.

Airtable, it would be SO useful to have Lookup fields only pull in unique values. The mockup @David_Krizan shared with a “Only display unique linked records” toggle would be amazing.

Same issue here — and, as another user mentioned, ARRAYUNIQUE() doesn’t actually work — all the duplicates remain except now they’re no longer clickable. Not having this feature makes it difficult to use Airtable for most purposes beyond what I’d do in Google Sheets.

Came here from Google with this exact problem. The solution proposed above was exactly what I was looking for in the UI – please implement!

It’s shocking to see this hasn’t been addressed after three and half years, and is making me question whether to adopt Airtable, as this is something I’m encountering two days into the product trial and it will clearly frustrate all of my intended uses of the product.

Filtering out duplicates in a displayed lookup field isn’t even available in interface designer, so far as I can tell? Was this tested by any UX designers?

Three year old bugs that require the use of workarounds that eat up premium service allowances makes me feel like the product is in sales & maintenance mode and I’d be better off sticking with what I can accomplish in Sharepoint…

Would love this feature too!

This would solve a big problem for us. The user @David_Krizan posted a screenshot that would solve all our problems. It’s been several years and we haven’t had any movement on this topic.

Come on Airtable, throw me a freakin’ switch! I (and many others) have been asking for this for over 3 years now! There’s been a US presidential election and a global pandemic in the interim, and all we’re asking for here is a wee little switch that does the ARRAYUNIQUE() function.

In case y’all forgot…

In the last two days I’ve implemented about six instances of the whole lookup—>rollup—>automated multiselect field. At an overhead of extra fields and at least two automations per.

Seems there are a bunch of other commonsense features that are missing, and complained of for just as long… :triumph:

(Some of which mirror this one, in that you need to use this trick to work around them. Like teasing items out of a multiselect into discrete single selects, so you can generate a kanban; rather than being able to specify which value in multi-select to use as the key when creating the stacked view…)

Is it correct that the rollup & automated entry on update workaround only functions for entering items into a choice select field, but not into a multiple link field? Even if the string matches when manually typing it into the link field?

Like so:

If it matters, the Entry Grid is pulling from the Sync Grid in their mutual origin base and they are both sync’d to this destination base.

The project here is adapting Airtable’s sample “legal analysis” template so each instance of the template can draw upon a common source base relating points of law to their supporting cases and code sections.

The original discussion of this technique was talking about input to linked item fields, not choice fields, so I’m not sure what’s up with the behavior I’m seeing. I did have to use SUBSTITUTE(ARRAYJOIN(ARRAYUNIQUE(values)), '"', '') in the rollup to strip the quotation marks that appear when manipulating sync’d data, as opposed to just ARRAYUNIQUE(values) – does that have something to do with it?

The log appears to indicate permission errors, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense…

"Updating the record failed due to insufficient permissions.
Learn how to fix common issues…

You first, Airtable.

I need this as well. Anyone knows if this feature is planned for a future update or has it been ignored all this time?

The lack of this feature has been a major headache for the past couple of days. There is no adequate workaround. Sure would be nice to be able to toggle a unique lookup like @David_Krizan proposed.

Still facing this problem 3.5 years since the original post. After seeing the number of people requesting a fix for so long, I hope Airtable is considering prioritizing this feature. @Adam_Minich

+1 this feature would greatly benefit our organization as well, seems like a very intuitive thing to implement.

+1 on the request for @David_Krizan 's proposed solution to add an “Only display unique linked records” switch here. :slightly_smiling_face:

+1 from me also! It would help greatly

+1 it’s kinda ridiculous at this point

+1 for that one !!!

+1 For this useful switch!!

It’s a bug in Airtable.

But you can get the desired effect by creating a rollup field instead of a lookup field, and using the formula:

ARRAYUNIQUE(values)

Please airtable add this feature!!

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In the meantime, you can achieve similar functionality by creating a rollup field with the formula:

ARRAYUNIQUE(values)

Maybe people should read the case before suggesting Arrayunique, which is not a solution (you don't have linked records)

I'd love to see this feature (a "display only unique linked records" toggle)

Forever bumping this thread, 1612 days after it was posted

+1. This is pretty basic. I agree that the duplicates seem more like a bug than a feature - I guess maybe there's a use case where that would be helpful but I can't think of one. Adam Minich's workaround on page 3 seems like the best option, but still isn't great.

Just thought I would add myself to the dozens of users requesting the very simple solution of allowing us to filter out duplicates from lookup fields. 

Very disheartening as a relatively new enterprise account manager that this functionality is not available, and that is has been requested for 3.5 years with no response from Airtable. 

ARRAYUNIQUE(values) may not actually return a list of unique values if the field you are rolling up is a multiple select list. In that case, 'values' is an array of arrays, and ARRAYUNIQUE correctly identifies ['foo', 'bar'] as being different from ['foo','baz'] but the rollup field will still contain 'foo' twice.

I was thinking you oughta be able to use something like

but it doesn't seem to be an option in rollup fields. But even when doing it in a formula field with

I'm still not having any luck. It looks like ARRAYFLATTEN isn't doing anything, or maybe I am misunderstanding the contents of the rollup field.

• I would've expected the rollup to contain [['foo','bar'],['foo','baz']]
• and ARRAYFLATTEN to give me ['foo','bar','foo','baz']
• and ARRAYUNIQUE to give me what I want: ['foo','bar','baz']

But whether or not I use ARRAYFLATTEN the result is the same.