Filter to show cells with multiple occurences of the same item?

[Edward_Gavitt]

Hi, I’ve built a base for a music conservatory. We are tracking student groupings for an ensemble. The students field are linked from a database tab.

We are trying to avoid having one student in two groups, or at least flagging the groups that share a student. I hope this is clear! Is there a way to do this?

[Russell_Bishop1]

Hey Edward,

Are the students stored in their own table, and linked to the groups? Alternatively, is each student’s name written in its own column on the Groups table (e.g. Student 1, Student 3…), or just stored in a single field comma separated?

If there is some separation, you can run an automated check on every group to try to find other groups that contain the same student names (using the Find Records step).

If they are just in one field, you’d likely need to write a script that can split the names into an array and look for each of them.

For a more manual solution, Airtable has an extension called Dedupe, which you can manually run yourself to find duplicates, although again this will less accurate unless you’ve separated the student names somehow.

Hope that helps!

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hi Edward, if it’s possible to have a Students table and a Groups table, you could probably just use a Count field for this, like so?

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I figure you probably already know this though and can’t do this due to a specific business need. If you could share some screenshots of your base I could try to provide some suggestions

[Edward_Gavitt]

Russell: There is a student directory that holds all the student data. I have them stored as following:
[First Name] [Last Name] on primary field, then I also have a field with [first name] and another field with [last name], also have their IDs in one field, and another field with [first name][last name][id] Could this work with the find record step? I’ll also look into the extension you mentioned.

Adam: Thanks! That would definitely work in the student view, then I could filter where count is >1. But was also wondering if there was a way to flag this in the groups view maybe, not just the individual student view.