Dedupe App is fantastic!

[ScottWorld]

I had the pleasure of using the Dedupe App the other night on a huge client project that involved 3,500 duplicates with mismatched data.

Not just pairs of duplicates, but sometimes groups of 2, 3, or 4 duplicates. And not IDENTICAL duplicates, but duplicates that might or might not have different field information from one another.

I was really dreading the project, but it turned out incredibly well because the Dedupe App is absolutely perfectly designed!!

The Dedupe App is EXTREMELY well-designed, EXTREMELY intuitive, EXTREMELY powerful, and it has ALL THE OPTIONS that you could ever dream of in a Dedupe App!

For example:

• You can match on any number of fields that you’d like.

• You have the option to hide matching fields (i.e. fields where the data is 100% the same across multiple records), so you can instantly tell at-a-glance if you can safely merge multiple records.

• It lets you REMOVE records from a set of 3 or more duplicates, so you can just merge the records that you want to merge.

• It has full keyboard shortcut support built into the app, so you can quickly fly through thousands of duplicates without continually moving your mouse all over the screen.

• You can skip over groups of duplicates if you’re not sure what you want to do at the current moment.

• And much more.

Whoever designed this app within Airtable deserves a gold medal. I’ve worked with several database platforms throughout the years, and I’ve never seen Dedupe functionality as good as this one before.

Whoever designed this app is really a rockstar who TRULY UNDERSTANDS the headaches & the hassles that go along with eliminating duplicates — and they solved ALL THE PROBLEMS for us! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

I am truly blown away by this app. I was able to get through 3,500 duplicates in less than 2 hours, thanks to this app.

Thank you, Airtable!! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: :raised_hands: :thumbs_up: :pray:

@Taylor_Savage @Jason @raghavsethi

[kuovonne]

I agree, it’s a sweet app. For new users, it isn’t quite obvious how to select which field values to keep, but it makes sense once you figure it out.

[John_inNJ]

I struggle with this app. I have a zillion calculated fields which all show up in the dedupe interface. Why? I can’t merge calculated fields, why are they there? It’s a lot of scrolling to skip all of them.

[ScottWorld]

@John_inNJ If you’re having a specific problem, I would recommend taking screenshots of your problem and posting as a brand new thread.

[Gaelen_Kash]

@ScottWorld @kuovonne @Taylor_Savage @Jason @raghavsethi Help me understand how to use the features of Dedupe. It does seem pretty straightforward, but it is NOT recognizing that Daniel Nelson and Dan Nelson (for example) are the same person and should be a duplicate. It’s not even offering it as a suggestion. As I’ve been manually going through my database I keep running into use cases that are going unrecognized as duplicates. I can’t figure out what I am doing wrong. Help!

[ScottWorld]

But “Daniel Nelson” and “Dan Nelson” are not duplicates — those are 2 different names. That’s not something that Airtable can figure out for you. Like you said, you would have to manually clean that up on your own.

[kuovonne]

@ScottWorld is correct. Dedupe cannot match names with nicknames or abbreviations. It has limited ability to do fuzzy matching for minor typos, as described in the support page.