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Transform Multiple-Select Data to Single-Select?

  • June 9, 2022
  • 5 replies
  • 49 views

Anna11
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Hi all! I’m conducting a survey that includes a multiple-select field. Has anyone devised a formula or some other clever way to transform multiple-select data into single-select fields (toy example below). I came up with a way of doing it in Excel and then pasting it back into Airtable, but I’m wondering if there is a more elegant approach (other than having the fields be single-select to start out with, which makes for a sub-optimal survey experience). Thanks!

5 replies

Kamille_Parks11
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Is this something you will regularly need to do, or just once when you import your data?


Anna11
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  • Author
  • Inspiring
  • 36 replies
  • June 9, 2022

Is this something you will regularly need to do, or just once when you import your data?


I only need to do it once for each survey response, but there are a lot of responses and they will be coming in over a long time period during which I’d like to keep the second table updated.

For context, the purpose of the second table is to be able to have a view of all the respondents grouped by A, B, and C. Grouping by the multiple select field puts each combination into a separate group.


ScottWorld
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  • Genius
  • 9814 replies
  • June 10, 2022

Hmm… I’m sure that @Kamille_Parks will come up with a clever solution for this, but I use Make.com for everything, so that’s what I would personally use for this.

When a new record is created, I would have a Make scenario loop through the array of multi-select options, and then create individual records in your junction table for each unique combination of name & option.

In Make, it could be setup as simply as this, but there are other ways of setting this up as well:

This is what the iterator module would look like — this is how you loop through the multi-select field:


kuovonne
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  • Brainy
  • 6009 replies
  • June 10, 2022

Is this something you will regularly need to do, or just once when you import your data?


@Kamille_Parks And here I was so sure that if you posted, you’d recommend having a two table system.


Kamille_Parks11
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@Kamille_Parks And here I was so sure that if you posted, you’d recommend having a two table system.


That is normally my MO, but my thinking here was that if this is just a one -time data import its probably just one table. If you regularly need to split the records apart it would be a two-table setup.

#Team2Tables