Find Records - Return one records data for title purposes in Automation

[Manny_Vergara]

We use a daily report of hours worked (we manage all our timesheets via airtable) that is based on Finding Records from the day before (or 3 days before on Mondays). My goal is to be able to title that report (which is created to Google Docs and then shared with admin) with the date for which the timesheet was generated (today is the 8/30, but the timesheets in question will be from 8/29).

Is there a way to only reference one of the records for this purpose instead of inputting the whole string from ‘Make a new list of… Field values’?

Any suggestions on how to get the right date in the title without repeats would be great, thanks!

[ScottWorld]

Hmm… that’s a tricky one.

There are probably several different ways of doing this, but the easiest way might be to just perform another “find records” action that you know will always result in just one record only, and insert the date from that one record.

However, since your records are going to be completely different from one day to the next, you might not be able to come up with a condition that always isolates just one record from your existing table. So you would probably need to create a separate table that just has one record in it, along with a formula field that always results in the proper date (either yesterday or 3 days ago). Then perform a find on that table for that one record. (You can have more than one record in that table too, as long as you can just isolate the one record in your find.)

[Manny_Vergara]

I figured this was going to be the solution but was hoping for something cleaner :rofl:
Thanks Scott.

[ScottWorld]

@Manny_Vergara Hahaha, there actually is a cleaner way of doing this (and a cleaner way of handling many Airtable automations). But it requires using Make, an external low-code automation platform. Personally, I’m a big fan of Make because it’s super-powerful, super-easy, and super-inexpensive. (Many of my clients are just using their free plan, so it doesn’t cost them anything at all.)

In your particular case, to search records, combine those records into a list, and then create a Google Doc with that information — and just ONE date at the top of the document — it would be as simple as the 3 steps in the screenshot below:

[Alexey_Gusev]

It’s possible, but I don’t understand your criteria used to choose the single record from list. Here is example how to get a single record id from list with additional condition (in my case it’s ‘not the record from trigger’)

[Nora_Brown]

Also see https://community.airtable.com/t5/automations/how-to-get-one-record-from-quot-find-records-quot-step... for using a scripting step to return just a single value.