How to remove duplicate records

Hi ​@blmahonsmsl,

I try to solve issues of duplication at source, which is far simpler than creating de-duplicating scripts. This may be best addressed within your Zap.

Assuming your setup currently uses a Create Record step:

1. Change your Create Record step to a Find Record.
2. In your configuration, search by the registrant's email (and some event identifier, if you have multiple events).
3. Check "Create Airtable Record if it doesn't exist yet?"
4. Configure your step to create a record as before.

This way, if a registrant exists, the Zap will stop when it finds a record. If no record is found, it will create one. This should go a fair way to stopping duplicates. Use this in combination with a manual search using the Delete Duplicate Extension.

Tim
minnow.tech

​@blmahonsmsl 

If your duplicate records are already in Airtable, you can use Airtable’s DeDupe extension to manually merge duplicate records together.

However, as ​@TimBeeston mentioned above, it’s typically best to prevent the duplicates at the source, before they come into Airtable to begin with.

You mentioned Zapier in your message above, but I would strongly recommend doing this with Make, because Make is infinitely more powerful than Zapier and is significantly cheaper than Zapier. I wrote an entire post comparing Make vs. Zapier here.

If you want to merge duplicate records, Make offers an Upsert Record module for Airtable, which will automatically (a) add the new record if it doesn’t already exist in Airtable, or (b) it will automatically merge the duplicate record if it already exists in Airtable.

(If you want to delete duplicate records, Make also offers a Delete Record module as well.)

Below is a screenshot of how you could use the Upsert Record module to take a record submitted by a Fillout form and merge it with a pre-existing duplicate record in Airtable.

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

p.s. If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

Hey ​@blmahonsmsl,

Fully agree with ​@ScottWorld’s comment above. 
1. For existing duplicates you’ll want to install and run the Dedupe Extension (do note that extensions will only work for paid plans).
2. If you do not have a paid plan, the easiest way you’ll be able do find duplicates is by grouping by a given field (e.g. Email Address field). If two records are found on such group, then you obviously have a duplicate.
3. You will want to make changes to your set up to avoid future duplicates. I support Scott’s enthusiasm about Fillout. However, for automations/integrations I would suggest taking a look at n8n (rather than zapier or make). You can read more about each automation software here.

Feel free to reach out or schedule a call if you’d like us to go through it together. I’d be happy to help out.

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Hey there,

I have dealt with this issue myself when building an Events Planning Base and what we found best to do, to cover all scenarios and not lose information, was to save all registrations into a Regsitrations table (could also be called Interactions).

Then every new interaction is processed by an Airtable automation to link to the correct Customer. In this way if a customer signs-up mutiple times they will only be counted once towards the Events total registrations, and you can use this information to detect if something is not clear in the registration process.

I would recommend to take advantage of Airtable forms that have pretty good functionality, and keep the whole process within Airtable and avoid using external services if possible. In this case its seems doable.

If you'd like some Airtable guidance, you can schedule a free meet here. Happy to help!

Matt Nixon

​@Mike_AutomaticN’s comments reminded me that I have another technique for deduping duplicates that doesn’t require an automation nor an extension, so it can be used on the free plan natively within Airtable.

I discuss this deduping technique on this Airtable podcast episode.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant 

Can try to write a script which matches the email and delete records in batch of 50 within same script