Find, Group & Sort Similar Records

[Darci]

Greetings mighty Airtable community,

We are trying to set up a very simple automation called "FIND SIMILAR RECORDS" within our blog article base (hundreds maybe thousands of records/titles/articles) that would look like the example below. When a new record is created, we'd like to automatically Find and Group (and Sort) similar records in order to look for redundancy or duplicates. Meaning:

• Every time someone goes to "create a new record"
• When "specific service" field is [current item] entered into the new record
• And/Or "keyword" is [current item] entered into the new record
• Automatically Find and Group similar records in order to look for redundancy or duplicates

We'd like this to be an automation rather than to set it up as a simple search option.

It seems like a simple request but the free version will not play nice. When we asked Airtable support if the app will do this, they said they cannot help with automation setup. For example, we're not sure:

-- if this would be a script to run, or if there are better automation options in the paid version -- we hope so anyway.

-- We are also not sure if [current item] would work in an automation. Meaning when a user goes to "create a new record", the "specific service" field is a dropdown list and can be any of 10 items. The "keyword" field is a text field allowing any text to be entered. Most importantly, we are asking the automation to "find similar records" based on the [current item] -- which is what the user enters when creating the new record. Is this doable with airtable?

Just to reiterate, this is a "find similar records" automation -- but we're having a devil of a time trying to get the automation to work (with the free version). So thought we should reach out to the community before jumping in on a paid version to see if it will work with AirTable, or moving along to another solution.

thank you for any and all suggestions, Darci

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Yeap it will.  Do note that automations don't run on records that already meet the trigger conditions when you turn it on; it'll only run on records that newly meet the conditions

To run it on historical records you'll need to trigger the automation manually, perhaps with a checkbox field

---
The trigger for your automation might not be ideal as well unless you're planning on creating one automation per possible condition? 

[Darci]

Thanks Adam,

You would think that "When a record matches conditions" (meaning a new record created), or "When a record is created" (meaning a new record), or "When a record is updated" (meaning a change to a record) ------ that any one of those triggers would effect the one new record within the Base -- for example we expect to see the trigger find similar records and sort them together -- but we are seeing no movement at all.

Our understanding of the conditional logic is much better, thank you! -- meaning there's a good chance we have used workable triggers and logic (see screenshots), however, nothing effects the data when a record is "created", "updated", or when "matches conditions" -- it's nada!!

Any ideas here? Thanks always, Darci

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hm those conditions look fine, especially the "When record is created one".  To troubleshoot this I'd suggest viewing the run history for that automation to see what happened after it triggered and where it failed: https://support.airtable.com/docs/getting-started-with-airtable-automations#using-the-run-history

[Darci]

I'll check it out in detail shortly.

Adam, thanks so much for all your help, we are much obliged! 

It could be that our automation request is too simple -- meaning if we keep the Base in a "grouped" and "sorted" view, then we can achieve our "find duplicates" or "find similar records" that way. But it's more of a sure bet if an automation does it.

Was hoping to impress the boss 😅 But we might have to stick with Google Sheets as that app "groups" and "sorts" all the same. So you see, we were looking for a real records/database app that could ensure the rules.

all my best, Darci Oltman (marketing project manager)