Automation or formula- Highlight updates to in a record based on changes to fields

[Lauren_Briskin1]

Hi!

I am not finding a similar topic, or the answer I need.

I have about 20 fields that will be populated, then reviewed periodically. Each time they are reviewed, the values have the potential to be changed. If they are changed, someone else needs to review the changes. They do not need to review all of the other fields for a record.

I thus need an easy way to call out the changed fields:
If field “a” changed, show a big UPDATE! notification in field “a-update.”

Previously, I’ve built out 20 formula fields to do this, but that required having field “a original,” field “a new” and then field “a-update (formula)” which was IF(“a original”!=“a new”, UPDATE!). The new table isn’t set up this way- we’re not always going to show the old version AND I really really don’t want to keep building out 20 formulas.

What I’d love to do is an automation that populates field “a-update” with UPDATE!, and I’d like to do one automation that covers all of my fields. Is this possible?

If necessary, I can build a formula field that would show changes, but I’m not sure quite how to do that without displaying the original value.

ETA: I think this user is sort of describing what I’m looking for, but I do have the added field of the user checking off that they’ve reviewed the record. They’re just not noting when they’ve updated a field. FR: Show Revisions to Specific Fields Only -OR- Tied to Shown Fields in View

Thanks!

[Jack_P]

Airtable will be coming out with conditional logic for Automations pretty soon. That should allow you to nest as many IF statements as you need and set one for each of the fields within the same Automation.

I’d recommend waiting until that beta comes out and then playing with the options before diving too deep into an alternative.

[Lauren_Briskin1]

Thanks. Sadly I have a fairly massive and urgent project with a hard deadline (elections won’t wait for product development, which hurts me since I’m in product in elections!)

I started building something out with “Date updated” fields, but it still seems to require:

1. A date updated field for each field i need to track
2. A humongous formula (that I can’t get right) for If(x date updated field, “x field updated”) for all of those fields.

Is there a better way?