Sending an email if 2 or more selected in Multiple Select

[Rohan_Bansal]

Hi! I’m fairly new to Airtable, and I have a question about the automations.

I’m building a form with a multiple-select field. I want to send the user an email IF they select two choices or more. As far as I can see, this isn’t a valid trigger in the automations window.

Help is appreciated!

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable Community!

You are correct that there isn’t a specific trigger for when a multi-select field has two or more choices selected. However, you can build up to this situation.

1. Create a formula field that counts how many items are selected in the multi-select field. The COUNT functions don’t work on multi-select fields, so you have to use a workaround by counting the commas in the field value.

IF( 
  multi, 
  LEN(multi) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(multi, ",", "")) + 1, 
  0
)

2. Create your automation with a “when record meets conditions” trigger. Have the condition be based on the value of the formula field.

Here are a couple of cautions:

• This method assumes that you do not have any commas in your multi-select choices. If you have a comma in a multi-select choice, this method will not work.
• This method works best if the field value is being set with a form or some other method that sets all values of the multi-select at once. If someone manually sets the values one at a time, the automation may trigger before the person is done selecting all the choices and you may get unexpected results.