How can I count the number of changes to a specific field and return an integer value?

[Kas_Eelman]

Hi all, I’m using Airtable as a PM collecting feature requests from my stakeholders - I want to assign a status to those requests (i.e parked, exploring, on roadmap, completed, out of scope) and want to trigger an email when the status of their request has changed.

The trigger is fine but I only want the trigger the email when the status is changed the second time since i have a separate trigger for the first change sending a ‘feedback’ field in the email while the status trigger is just to inform them of a change to their request.

My idea was to create a column with a formula that counts the number of modifications to a specific field (in this case status field) and set the trigger to fire when {count of modifications} > 1 so that it will fire if updated in the future everytime the status field is modified. Curious to see if this is possible. Thanks!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, I think you could try adding a text field called “Updated before”

And the automation trigger would be “When Status field is updated`”, and would have two conditionals

The first conditional would be if the Updated before field was empty, and if that was the case it would update the Updated before field to be “Yes”

And the second conditional would be if the Updated before field was not empty, in which it would send the email

Does that make sense?

[Kas_Eelman]

Thanks for the suggestion!

I actually used an automation to update a single text record called ‘status_change’ with a character (n+1 basically) every time my ‘status’ field was updated and then had a formula column called ‘status_change_count’ with LEN({status_change}) and then created my email automation to trigger if that formula column value is > 1

Actually works quite well because I can also see how often the field has been changed.